The one million dollar stiletto, says Stuart Weitzman, was really just an idea. “I made shoes for celebrities, but you never saw them on TV,” complained the designer. “Either she covered the dress, or they just talked about jewelry and hair and dress.” One of his employees asked why he wasn't just designing the most expensive shoes in the world. And so it started: For the 2002 Academy Awards, Weitzman equipped the then unknown actress Laura Harring (“Mulholland Drive”) with a stiletto set with 464 diamonds. The value: a million dollars. The attention of the world press catapulted Weitzman overnight into a league with Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin and Sergio Rossi.

The designer, who turns 80 this Thursday, no longer needs such flashy tricks.

With a tireless work ethic and a unique aesthetic, Weitzman has fought hard for the shelves at retailers and for space in the closets of customers such as Beyoncé, Jill Biden and Serena Williams.

Weitzman designed his first shoes at the age of 16.

His father owned a shoe factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

But Weitzman wanted to go to Wall Street and enrolled at Wharton Business School.

He financed his studies with shoe sketches, which he sold to the father of a friend who was also a shoe manufacturer. 

Footwear at a fraction of the price of the competition

When Weitzman's father died two years after graduation, the designer was just 24 years old. From then on he led the company with his brother, became chief designer and finally founded his own brand in 1986, which sold upscale, fashionable footwear at a fraction of the prices of the competition. He succeeded mainly because he ran all nine factories in Spain himself. He had settled there when the American shoe industry lost ground; first bought shares in a shoe factory, then the whole company and then others. In this way, he was not only able to control the processes, but also to react to trends in just a few days.

Some of his designs became bestsellers;

like the thigh-high boot "5050" that hugs the leg like leggings.

Or the "Corkswoon";

a cork wedge that is one of the Duchess of Cambridge's favorite shoes.

But the best known is the "nudist", a high-heel sandal with thin straps and stiletto heels, which has been sold more than 50,000 times.

It was not uncommon for celebrities like Diane Kruger or Blake Lively to wear the same model on the same Oscar night.

Some celebrities stated that these were the only high heels that could be worn for long periods of time.

"Shoes are my gold medals" 

Because Weitzman attached great importance to fit and comfort. He turned away from the old creed that beauty always brings suffering. “Women mainly wear my shoes because they feel good,” said the designer, who did not want shoes to be understood as silly accessories, but rather as armor that their owner literally wears around the world. "There are shoes that enter a room before a woman and only leave it after her," said Weitzman at an honor at the New York Historical Society. “Shoes are my gold medals.” The designer has never cared much for the prominent names on his customer list. Rather, it honored him, for example, when he saw women in the subway with his bags. Or that he was the first non-Spaniard to be named "Hijo Predilecto" in the city of Elda,to the “favorite son” of the city - “by the workers, not the factory owners”.

Weitzman is also an avid collector.

He not only collects historical footwear, but is also interested in philately and numismatics.

The designer made childhood dreams come true with his fortune.

In 2014, for example, he bought the “British Guiana 1 ¢ magenta” for the record sum of 9.5 million dollars - the most expensive postage stamp in the world.

“In my childhood album,” he joked in the “New York Times”, “there was still free space at the top for this stamp.” In addition to several rare postage stamps, he also owned the “St.

Gaudens Double Eagle ”, a $ 20 gold coin.

He bought it in 2002 for $ 7.59 million.

He still has a lot to do

After an exhibition in the National Postal Museum in Washington, he had his treasures auctioned in June: the coin for $ 18.87 million, the "British Guiana" for 8.3 million. Liquidity problems were not the cause; Weitzman had already sold his company to the American luxury group Coach (now Tapestry) for more than half a billion dollars in 2015. He stayed on board for two years as Chairman Emeritus, meanwhile the former Loewe designer Giovanni Morelli is on board as creative director.

Weitzman, who has two children with his wife Jane, wants to donate his money and the 16 hours a day he has spent in the last 40 years to charitable projects. In Madrid he wants to build a museum dedicated to Spanish-Jewish history. He wants to become more involved in the National Olympic Committee of the United States than before, and he also trains for table tennis championships. And he also wants to bring a Broadway musical about Andy Warhol to the stage: "I can hardly wait to get started."