Manolo, the world’s first superstar shoeblogger finally comes clean as H.D. Miller, chair of the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Lipscomb University in Nashville:
In April of 2002, I launched a political rant blog under the title “Travelling Shoes”, a blog that lasted three years, was widely read, and has since thankfully disappeared from the internet, taking with it opinions about politics that I would like to forget I ever held. After that, my history as a writer took a surreal turn, and in October of 2004 I became one of the first fashion bloggers, a pseudonymous figure cited in the press as both one the funniest things on the internet, and a model of how fashion blogging was changing commerce. I did very well from that venture, well enough to quit being an academic and move to Argentina for a year. Unfortunately, that year was 2008, the year of the economic crash. By early 2009 advertising had dried up and my business was in trouble, and so I moved back to the States and went back to work in the real world, back to the academy.
I met H.D. around 2008 when he was still deep undercover as Manolo; it was a brilliant strategy, creating a niche for himself as a pioneer in the then-new world of fashion blogging (which is now ubiquitous, with loads of one-person fashion blogs and photo-oriented Tumblr sites, and established publications adding blogs to their Websites after initially sneering at the notion in the early naughts). And simultaneously, a way to completely depoliticize a blog by establishing a new identity, along with the outrageously affected tone of the European panache that was the shoe-blogging style of the Manolo.
Has the Manolo persona been retired? If so I will miss him. Perhaps I will wear the shoes of the blue suede in his honor today.
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