Newsnight Review discussed the Manolo Blahnik exhibition in London at the Design Museum.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine, shoes as art, are they pulling our leg?

GERMAINE GREER:
It is at the Design Museum, so it's important not to get carried away. They do wallpaper, egg cups, spoons, knives and forks. It is definitely designed, and they are very beautifully made objects. I would like to have known a bit more about the factories near Milan that make the shoes, because transforming these drawings into shoes is an act of genius. We heard about him whittling his heel shapes and so forth, but it is the stitching and the brilliantly beautiful way these things are finished. It is probably because I'm a crusty old woman that I think that the earliest shoes are the best, because they are closest to the Italian tradition. They look more like Ferragamo and people like that, who were making fabulously sensual shoes. Originally, Italian shoemakers used to make shoes for women with broad hips, short legs and broad feet, and they made their feet look gorgeous.

MARK LAWSON:
Does it matter that they are they difficult to walk in?

GERMAINE GREER:
Now the point is that you can only wear those shoes if you are Sarah Jessica Parker, and you have sparrow legs. They only make them in sizes 35-40. About 20% of English girls take a size larger than 40. You have to have prefect feet to start with. You don't even need any shoes, you can just paint them on!

MARK LAWSON:
Even Sarah Jessica Parker has said about this, "I've destroyed my feet but it was worth it."

PAUL MORLEY:
I take a size 43, so alas, I couldn't fit into any of them. One of the searches of my life is to find the male equivalent. I like the exhibition. In a way, there is so much of it, there are so many shoes that he's made in there that you wanted parts of it, occasionally, to be treated like a sculpture, and have that sense of a few shoes, instead of so many. What was missing, for me, was what makes the shoe, the foot. The combination of the shoe and the foot, and the way the shoe wraps around the foot.

MARK LAWSON:
They were probably being used by people!

PAUL MORLEY:
I would have loved to have seen a foot, and there are a few of those shoes that I'll be taking home to my girlfriend, and trying on, to get the complete picture. Of all the people today that may have a hold on genius that we've been reviewing, Rushdie or Spielberg, I'd say Manolo Blahnik, because he created wonderful ways of merging the human body with the earth. It's fabulous the way he finds simplicity and such minimalism, and yet such variety, strength and beauty. I am a big admirer.

MARK LAWSON:
Bill, they are being taken seriously, aren't they? There is a huge catalogue, which is like an edition of Cinderella, in which only the scene where they try the shoes on is in, page after page. It's beautiful, but are they worth it?

BILL BUFORD:
The catalogue is very interesting, because it has two kinds of quotes. Quotes like Joan Rivers', something like, "They're slut pumps". That when you walk by a man, you want to say, "Hey, sailor, what are you doing today?" Anna Winters got a great quote which describes them very accurately as style statements and design statements, and things that women want to wear, that are beautiful and sexy. That's fine, but then there's this other stuff, which describes them as Picasso, and describes him as the "great artist". Then you go through the exhibit, and there seems to be this great effort to make it serious. "He reads books and literature." Wow! "He knows film directors." Wow! He's making shoes. At the end of the day, they are great shoes, and I was really looking forward to it, because I have the privilege of working in a building where everybody wears these shoes, and I was there in the elevator when suddenly they went from pointy to round. But it was so pretentious and serious.

PAUL MORLEY:
I thought that he was a bit of a comedian. The greatest thing Naomi Campbell has ever done in her life was to say that he is the godfather of soul!