At £700 a pair, Manolo Blahnik shoes are the latest celebrity love token and status symbol. But, writes Suzanne Moore, they tell us more about shopping and lifestyle than desire

Manolo Blahnik is obviously the greatest Spaniard of all time. "He's Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton - a genius. I fall at his feet and worship at his temple." So says Isaac Mizrahi. Fashion types, as you may have noticed, are not given to understatement. If you are not au fait with such a universe, it is even possible - though scarcely believable - that you have not heard of the "Picasso of shoes" who makes the very expensive and beautiful objects that Sarah Jessica Parker, and nearly every supermodel, wears on her feet. Again, it is possible, but scarcely credible, that the average New Statesman reader may be more interested in the war in Iraq than in fancy footwear. But all I can say is that, in these times, we need a little lift.

And even if you haven't got a pair, be honest, you wish you did, don't you? I mean, Madonna says they are better than sex and Suzy Menkes marvels at the way no one but Manolo can build so much sexual arousal into a sliver of suede. You wear Manolos like a man might carry a loaded gun, says the Vogue journalist Julia Reed. These are sex shoes, limousine shoes, power shoes - "They are gestures, stories, full of possibility."

OK, maybe we should calm down a little. I am more than partial to a shoe myself, but even I don't buy all this "better than sex" lark. Chocolate, cooking, gardening and candlelit baths are now sold to women as being better than sex. We must con-clude that women are so unenthusiastic about sex that almost anything is better. What treats are next in store, I wonder? "Doing the dishes - better than sex"? The sad truth is that sex is no longer, if it ever was, the measure of female pleasure. It has been thoroughly usurped by consumption. Eighties-style shopping and fucking is a thing of the past. Today, we have just shopping and shopping.

Perhaps that is why there are queues to get into the Manolo Blahnik exhibition at the Design Museum, a building that is not usually heaving with visitors. Would you queue to get into a shoe shop? Probably not, but this is more than a shoe shop - and, in many ways, less: no trying, no buying. This is a beautiful candy store of an exhibition, full of Blahnik's amazingly theatrical creations.

The dream life of women is inscribed in their shoes. I still remember certain shoes I once wore in far greater detail than men I once wore out. Blahnik's sculptural objects speak of another life from the one that most of us know, a life in which walking is a tiny and challenging interruption to a whirl of lunches and taxis and Martinis and openings. Not all Blahniks are that high. The man himself sensibly advises that high heels don't suit everyone, so I defy a woman not to find a pair that she could get around in easily. Everything, I'm afraid to say, that the label queens claim about these shoes is true - they are perfectly finished, exquisite. But still, I am suspicious of this new-found interest in footwear.

You see, the one thing missing from this exhibition is feet. Shoes in display cases are just beautiful visual objects. There is no smell. You can't lift up one of these creations and see how magically light it is. You can't bury your bunioned toes in these glass slippers and feel their softness. This is a "look but don't touch" affair, yet, while I don't want to get too fetishistic about it, shoes work equally as sensual and as visual objects.

Manolos function at the high end of the female masquerade. Blahnik's influences, from Luchino Visconti to the Venetian carnival, show that he revels in this performance. Psychoanalytically, the idea of the masquerade is that femininity itself is always a simulacrum - there is no such thing as authentic femininity, only ever a representation of it. (And that is why, girls, you can never have too many shoes.)

Although the masquerade serves to reassure others, the fetishist seeks only to reassure herself. In most cultures, powerful women are encouraged to hide their masculinity. And what better way than high heels - very expensive high heels? Blahnik's fellow Spaniard Pedro Almodovar understands this only too well. As do most transvestites. The feminist rejection of fashion which saw heels as being purely about appealing to men lost most of its ground during the Eighties, not least because at the same time there was a real fear of high-heeled female executives.

Whatever certain feminists said, women were choosing to wear heels, which made them feel potent. This kind of sexual display was functioning, as Professor Elizabeth Wilson understood very early on, "as a kind of touch-me-not armour". Blahnik, who started off making platforms for Ossie Clark, has made all kinds of shoes, but is now synonymous with strappy, ultra-thin heels such as his metallic and vinyl confections for Galliano, which are beyond gorgeous.

To imagine that such objects are merely about phallic replacement, or meant purely to appeal to the opposite sex, is to undervalue them seriously. The fantasies that are being played out here are not so much about sex as lifestyle. The real shoe fetishist, as opposed to the discriminating consumer, has no need for an audience. She understands shoes as vaginal envelopes as well as phallic substitutes. Actually, Vivienne Westwood's shoes have always been far more perverse; Manolos, for all their brilliance, are not actually scary because the wearer of Manolos needs her public. However great Carrie Bradshaw's closet is in Sex and the City, with its boxes and boxes of shoes, it is the sight of her in her Manolos on city streets that appeals. They are the expensive underwear that everyone gets to see.

That Sex and the City is winding down (I mean, how old is Samantha meant to be now - 74?) illustrates how the fantasy itself has now become more and more about shopping, and less and less about sex. The "girls" have each other, fantastic clothes and fabulous shoes, so they may as well cut their losses with men.

Manolos are an essential part of this dream-world but, for me, they fit too easily into the current discourse of self-esteem and pampering that is sold as a privatised form of feminism. Forget improving your working conditions and really changing your life. Instead, the modern woman should continually treat herself - to a detox (a diet), a spa treatment (a hose-down), some Agent Provocateur knickers and some Manolos. Women should feel good about themselves, and the way we are supposed to do that is to spend vast amounts of money on ourselves because we are, as we are so patronisingly told, "worth it". This is cobblers. Even when it comes wrapped in tissue in a fancy shoebox, it's still cobblers.

So go and oohh and aahh over the lovely Manolos; save up if you like. But please don't kid yourself you are buying sex: you're not, any more than you are buying Sarah Jessica's life or Kylie's arse or Kate Moss's je ne sais quoi. For female self-indulgence fits in nicely with the commodification of every secret desire. Except now it's all postmodern and ironic and not so secret - we can run marathons in our Manolos because we are such stylish and crazy chicks. These are some shoes all right. But someone has to say it: fuck me, they are only shoes.

"Manolo Blahnik" is at the Design Museum, London SE1 (020 7940 8790; www.designmuseum.org) until 11 May.

Manolo Blahnik Drawings, with a foreword by Anna Wintour, is published by Thames & Hudson (£22.50)

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