I can't wear Jimmy Choos, Blahniks, Chanel or the Nine West knock-offs. Does that mean I should be classified as a peasant?

As legions of devotees can attest, Manolo Blahnik 's designs are worthy of any museum setting. Now fans can view the stiletto savant's creations at fine arts auction house Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg in New York. "Manolo Blahnik... The Shoe: A Celebration of Design," fresh from London's Design Museum, will run Sept. 10-19. But no need to just gaze longingly on the Manolo Blahnik shoes --- pick up a pair on Style.com, which is hosting a related online trunk show (Sept. 9-Oct. 6) featuring Blahnik's favorite designs reissued in limited editions.

Editors, designers and buyers are all eschewing her favourite heel, but Fashion Editor Lisa Armstrong finds a sympathetic ally in Manolo Blahnik

It is left to the master, Manolo Blahnik , to put this mess right. "I am allergic to those Manolo Blahnik shoes they love now," he declares. "I did that 20 years ago. Kitten heels dead -are you kidding? Espadrilles? Even the peasants in Spain have moved on. My God, everyone's becoming so infantile. All these diktats are demode. Fashion must move forward, but these days it's simply revivalism. You should stick to what you like. That's style."

I fear Manolo and I could be alone in this, but if it's any consolation, the shoe flux has, according to Hindmarch, put shoe-makers into a panic. "They have to look at different manufacturers, different deals -such as getting the right kind of specialised wood for a wedge heel, etc."

If you watch Sex and the City, Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo are what the four girls buy as a substitute for a love life, or to acquire one. Apparently, women will do anything to wear sexy-looking shoes.

Men have also succumbed to the Choo addiction, including singer Robbie Williams, who loves his custom boots, and an eccentric doctor whom Choo remembers fondly because he requested a pair of two-inch heels.

But Choo is no longer directly involved with the shoe label that made him famous. In 1996, he sold a 50 per cent stake in the company to then-business partner Tamara Yeardye Mellon, who launched a ready-to-wear line with creative director Sandra Choi (Choo shoes niece). In 2001, Mellon bought out Choo completely, for about US$ 30 million, after having transformed the label into a global success. Today, the company is owned by Phoenix Equity Partners, although Mellon remains president.

A crucial element of Mellon's success has been, undoubtedly, her luck in having a wealthy and doting father who lent her £150,000 to launch Jimmy Choo , but she is also gifted at reading which way the wind is blowing. From the beginning, she understood that the strength of the Jimmy Choo brand lay not just in shoe design but in brand image. "From the day I founded it, I've always seen the company as a luxury company, not a shoe company," she says.

Jimmy Choo was also one of the first British brands to establish a client base among LA celebrities, especially around award season, and has reaped the benefit in red-carpet fashion coverage. This year's Oscars is currently under threat because of the writers' strike but Mellon has already moved on: her tip for the next frontier of luxury retail is product placement. Jimmy Choo has secured lucrative appearances in Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada, and Mellon is pursuing more.

Jimmy Choo himself, the Hackney couture shoemaker with whom she went into business in 1996, was sidelined soon after. (In 2001, he sold his half of the company for £10m to Equinox Luxury Holdings.) Choo's wife's niece, Sandra Choi, who had worked with Choo , sided with Mellon, and despite rumblings of discontent over her low profile compared to Mellon, remains designer of the collections.

"I am eager to see where they will go," noted Jill Kohl, owner of two upscale boutiques located in Santa Monica, Calif., which currently stocks Choo shoes and bags. "They are expanding so fast, it will be interesting to see where this leads them. We are already heavy on the Jimmy Choo handbags -- we've ordered scores of them for the holiday season. I think there is a good opportunity out there for them in accessories -- they are smart [and] they wouldn't have made the deal if it wasn't prudent."

Equinox Luxury Holding Ltd, an arm of London-based Phoenix Equity Partners, recently acquired a majority stake in Jimmy Choo , the luxury shoe house.

As part of the buyout, Robert Bensoussan, former managing director of Gianfranco Ferre and president of Christian Lacroix, will become chairman and CEO of Equinox and CEO of Jimmy Choo Ltd. Meanwhile, Tamara Mellon, who helped thrust Choo into the limelight, becomes president of Jimmy Choo.

Jimmy Choo will also provide a men's collection of Choo shoes, bags and accessories.

Quite how everyone will get along remains to be seen but one thing's guaranteed: most of the guests are already half in love with Pilati, the swoon-makingly good-looking, impeccably dressed Italian designer who, at 41, has changed the face of fashion since he took over designing ysl two years ago. His name may not yet be anywhere near as well known as that of his former boss Tom Ford, but if you've thought to buy a wide waist-cinching belt, a tulip skirt or a pair of platform ysl shoes in the past year - well, that was Pilati's doing.

Lanvin's usually forgiving dresses were matched with killer peep-toe stilettos in patent leather with a wooden platform on the front. Chloe has wooden platform ysl boots  with a beguiling Mary Jane look while ysl 's canvas pumps were elevated several inches thanks to a canvas platform on the front and healthy stacked heels.

Which is why designers like Lars Nilsson are raiding the couture for techniques -- Nina Ricci's spring collection featured hand-finished scalloping, pin-roll seams, embroidered details and applique -- and, in some cases, the ateliers themselves. One of Nilsson's first moves was to hire the inscrutable Madame Colette, the former directrice of the ysl boots  couture division, to supervise the soft tailoring and draping at Ricci.

Certain 'it-ysl boots  , such as the Tribute stiletto by ysl , which has been worn by Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Lopez, are selling out fast. Harvey Nichols reports a 15 per cent rise in shoe sales this season and a higher demand for catwalk heels - the towering shoes models wear - than 'selling' heels, the shorter, tamer versions normally sold in stores. 'Most of the ysl shoes  we're selling have 14cm heels,' says Joanna Jeffreys of Harvey Nichols. 'Two seasons ago, 10cm seemed high. And people are buying into new names. We've stocked Alejandro Ingelmo's Terminator. It's 14cm high, it's fierce, and we've only got one pair left.'

Ford prized Pilati's talent as a second in command at ysl as he built parent company the Gucci Group into one of the three major fashion conglomerates of late-Nineties corporate fashion. When he joined, there was an implicit understanding that Pilati was the prince-in-waiting: one day, once Ford had re-established the aura of the most prestigious label in Parisian fashion, he'd take over the design. "I always had a picture in my mind of what I wanted to do," he says. " It kept me awake at night."

Manolo Blahnik also takes their Campari Mary Jane and dresses it up in the same tortoise patent leather. These shoes have a more sharply pointed toe than the pumps. They also have tonal grosgrain trim and a 3 1/2-inch covered heel. A little more expensive than the pumps, these Mary Janes are priced at $665. Like all Manolo Blahnik shoes, these run small, so order 1/2 size up for the best fit.

For years, Manolo Blahnik, the other British shoe designer with a ponytail, stood taller than his colleagues, mainly because of his own unwavering affection for the stiletto heel, an engineering feat the diameter of a thumbtack and fetishized by men and women alike. Blahnik remains the visionary against whom all other high-end shoemakers are judged. But lately, Mellon, a former It Girl from Britain, has been drumming her way into the frontal lobes of those who would spend $450 on a pair of Manolos by pitching her just-as-expensive Jimmy Choos as "a younger looking shoe." In the worldview she is selling, Manolo Blahnik shoes are for Mrs. X, the Mommy Dearest who guest-stars in the best-selling "Nanny Diaries," a witch on heels who organizes her panties in Ziploc bags. Choos are for the boot-loving Sara Ludlow, the "hottest girl" in Nick McDonell's new book "Twelve," a private-school purebred with a Nokia cellphone stuffed in her Prada bag. When George W. Bush was inaugurated, his 19-year-old twins, Barbara and Jenna, requested Jimmy Choo cashmere stiletto boots. Their dressmaker, Lela Rose, patiently explained that the girls didn't want to look like their mother.

As Mellon and Choi have grown bolder, making public statements that their only competition is Manolo Blahnik, they have earned the scorn of some in the fashion world for presuming to place themselves in the same league.

Blahnik, 60, is increasingly annoyed by the presence of this brand and its celebrity-chasing ways, admits George Malkemus, president of Manolo Blahnik U.S.A. According to a friend of Blahnik's, his grudge dates back to the days of the Hackney workshop, which he believes occasionally copied elements of his shoes for the magazines. Blahnik and others in the industry think they see echoes of ancient Manolos in some of the girls' shoes. "In the footwear industry, everybody and their cousin makes the claim that they've been copied," says Michael Atmore, the editorial director of Footwear News. "This is an industry full of knock-offs and slight variations of ideas, and it is impossible to trace who actually had the idea first." The topography of a Manolo Blahnik shoes is so limited that there are only a few points of distinction -- heel height and shape being one of them. Shoe designers are especially protective of those elements. Blahnik has lined his London store window with a fine layer of chicken wire to thwart the cameras of would-be copycats.

The flamboyant designer Manolo Blahnik is using precious gems for his latest range of footwear. Meredith Etherington-Smith reports

Some people are obsessive about Manolo Blahnik shoes. One friend of mine keeps her collection of more than 200 pairs carefully wrapped in silk in shoeboxes with Polaroids of the shoes taped to the front so that she won't have to disturb them in their cocoons unless absolutely necessary. Blahnik 's shoes, which are sexy to the point, almost, of perversion, are always beautifully made in the most perfect of leathers, the richest of fabrics, with the spikiest heels. They have been worn by the beautiful people of this world ever since this exquisite dandy, son of a Czech father and a Spanish mother designed his first Manolo Blahnik shoes for Ossie Clark in l972.