Quotable: This shoemaker thinks women who wear uncomfortable shoes are stupid

Years upon years of watching Sex and the City have etched Manolo Blahnik’s eponymous shoe line into our female collective unconscious, largely thanks to Carrie’s fanatical obsession with the Spanish designer’s heels, which gave his designs an almost myth-like status. Given all this adulation, Blahnik’s opinions about shoemaking and fashion fanatics are a bit surprising.

“The women who say, ‘I love to wear them, even if they kill me,’ are stupid. Whenever I start to talk about my work, it starts to sound so pompous and pretentious. After all, it’s just shoes.”

While we can’t imagine this will go over well with 90 per cent of fashion-conscious women (who hasn’t willingly suffered in a pair of painful but beautiful heels?), the good news is that there’s still a designer who gets fashion-before-comfort: Christian Louboutin. The designer famously said comfort is not his “focus”; rather, he wants women to feel “sexy” in his designs.