“I did have it most of my life—this obsession with Marie Antoinette,” Manolo Blahnik confides. It began in childhood, he says, when, growing up in the Canary Islands, his mother read aloud a biography of the queen: picnics, operas, dinners—“another world.” That early enchantment has only intensified over time and, as of this week, it manifests in a capsule of shoes timed to coincide with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s landmark exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style . It is Blahnik at his most deliciously anachronistic: eleven new styles that flirt with the eighteenth century and land squarely in 2025.

Lest we think he’s merely a devoted admirer, Blahnik and Marie go way back. He’s kept her close—reading biographies, seeing every film and exhibition, and trading long conversations with K

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