FIRST OF ITS KIND/ LAST OF ITS KIND

Born in 1942 to a Spanish mother and a Czech father, Manolo Blahnik grew up playing amid the banana trees of La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands. When he was young, his mother convinced a local cobbler to teach her how to make her own shoes; Blahnik spent hours watching her craft them by hand out of delicate satins and brocades. 

After studying law at the University of Geneva and pursuing theatrical set design in Paris, Blahnik moved to London in 1969, where he began working as a sales assistant at the boutique Feathers. The following year, he opened a shop of his own. In the spring of 1971, in collaboration with the British fashion designer Ossie Clark, he presented his first shoe collection as part of Clark’s Black Magic runway show at the Royal Court Theatre for an audience including the artists Cecil Beaton and David Hockney. His standout creation was a pair of lace-up suede heels crawling with verdant ivy and bright red cherries. “It was inspired by a crown of laurel leaves belonging to Alexander the Great,” says Blahnik, whose high heels would later become popular with Bianca Jagger and the Studio 54 set. 

Now, for his spring collection, Blahnik is reviving the house’s archival 1971 sandal, rebranded the Ossie. (Blahnik personally names every style he makes.) The open-toed heel comes in crepe de Chine with cream-coloured leaves and cerulean cherries, and there’s also a parakeet green suede version with leafy detailing wrapping around the ankle. “It reminds me of those fabulously eccentric years in London when nobody was doing anything for money,” says the 80-year-old designer, who lives between Bath and his family’s original home in the Canary Islands. “I don’t care much for flowers, but I do adore leaves and berries, which bring back old memories of playing out in the garden with my grandmother.”

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In the late 1800s, a teenage Guccio Gucci left Florence, Italy, and headed off to London, where he found work as a porter at the Savoy Hotel. Fascinated with the lifestyles of its international guests, he was inspired to inaugurate his own brand of leather travel goods. After apprenticing at the historic Milanese luggage manufacturer Franzi, he opened his first atelier in 1921 on Florence’s Via della Vigna Nuova, where he began making his own exquisite steamer trunks using Tuscan and imported leathers; he also designed walking sticks and umbrellas.

With the rise of automobiles during the 1930s, the demand for oversize cases diminished, so the house expanded into handbags. In 1947, its now-iconic bamboo-handled bag appeared in a shape reminiscent of a saddle. A few years later, the label debuted its signature vermilion-and-green grosgrain striped Web pattern, a nod to the woven straps that run underneath a horse’s body.

Today, Gucci is reprising an equestrian shoulder bag that was first shown in 1981. The original archival version featured a fold-over flap that was also contoured like a saddle with a clasp resembling a metal stirrup, while the new iteration comes in nine different variations (two of which are available in Australia) — from those with intricate floral embroideries and ostrich and lizard details to others accenting vintage mignon motifs with green and red piping. The bag is instantly identifiable by its hardware alone, and yet still as timeless as ever. 

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In September 1998, the British fashion designer Alexander McQueen presented his spring 1999 women’s wear collection, a rumination on the relationship between man and machine, in a former London bus depot. The Paralympic athlete and double amputee Aimee Mullins appeared in the show wearing a pair of intricately hand-carved ash legs designed by McQueen, who also paraded his signature bumsters and cutaway coats through the dimly lit warehouse. For the finale, the model Shalom Harlow walked out in a papery muslin dress with a billowing underskirt of white tulle and a belted chest harness — and then stood on a revolving wooden turntable, like a music box figurine, between two ominous-looking mechanical robots shipped in from an Italian car factory. They engaged with her in an eerie, menacing dance, and then began shooting paint at her, covering her dress with black-and-neon yellow graffiti. Harlow, who trained as a ballet dancer in her youth, flailed her arms as she spun around. “And when they were finished,” she later recalled, “they sort of receded and I walked, almost staggered, up to the audience and splayed myself in front of them with complete abandon and surrender.” The performance — like “High Moon” (1991), the Rebecca Horn installation that inspired it, of two rotating guns shooting red liquid at each other — was provocative and operatic, exactly the kind of spectacle that made McQueen’s shows so exhilarating to watch. 

For the brand’s fall 2022 men’s wear collection, the creative director Sarah Burton nodded to this moment with an ivory double-breasted jacket with peak lapels and pleated cigarette trousers covered in a similar poppy yellow-and-black spray-painted motif. The print was created by photographing a person in motion, capturing a blurred outline that was then engineered to wrap around the body of the suit before being printed on viscose cady fabric. The finished design looks almost like the result of a bomb blast — a fitting revival of an explosive coup de théâtre.