Manolo Blahnik has a dig at ‘Sex and the City’

Just as the second Sex and the City feature film began shooting in New York, the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, whose name became synonymous with the long-running TV show, told an interviewer he had very little interest in the contents of Carrie Bradshaw's wardrobe. "If people talk to me about Sex and the City I get sick," he said.

The 66-year-old Spanish-born designer, whose shoes have covered the pinkies of some of the most powerful and beautiful women in the world, was talking to the Sunday Telegraph ahead of the upcoming catwalk season.

Although he has been designing shoes for nearly 40 years, it is his association with SATC that has made him a household name. In New York, Blahnik said in horror, "the taxi drivers recognise me now".

He recounts how he was pestered by a woman in a New York airport queue. "There was a line forming behind me at passport control, I had to give her some in the end," he said. "It's sweet but it becomes too much and I don't feel comfortable. I have never wanted to be a celebrity designer."

But before Sarah Jessica Parker - the actress who plays Bradshaw in Sex and the City - bursts into tears at the slight, Blahnik later returned to the subject of SATC, perhaps mindful of the extra profits he's made from his association with it, and conceded he was "grateful to Miss Parker".

In one of the first scenes of the new film, being shot on the streets of Manhattan last week, Parker was spotted by the paparazzi in a white Halston dress and a pair of $2,000-plus gold-sequinned heels. But they weren't Blahniks - they were by Christian Louboutin.