The Monday sky in Paris is gravel grey, and the waters of the Seine are dangerously high after a night of heavy downpours. It has continued to rain all morning – the kind of rain that makes umbrellas redundant and windscreen wipers ineffectual. The taxi journey to Christian Louboutin’s office near the Louvre feels like one long car wash – weather for wellies rather than the sexy shoes synonymous with the designer. When I arrive, the storm has abated; office workers are beginning to venture out for their bistro lunches, and tourists are braving the winds to explore the riverside sights.
Outside Louboutin’s flagship boutique at 19 Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, two women in their mid-twenties are catching up on the weekend’s gossip. They look ineffably chic despite the downcast weather. Both are dressed in grey marl: long classic coats and slim ankle-grazing trousers. Their faces are fresh and their hair fastened in low, unfussy chignons. So far, so prescriptively Parisian, you may say. But then I clock their not-so-classic shoes. One wears embroidered sneakers with bold paisley swirls sewn in red, orange and blue beads; the other has opted for silver, 70s’-inspired platform boots, so glittery they appear to light up the dreary wet pavement beneath her soles, which are painted Louboutin red.
The women work at the company’s press office, nestled in a discreet courtyard on the same street. Louboutin owns a number of addresses on this patch near the Palais Royal, including a production workshop where bespoke designs are made-to-measure by a small team of artisans.
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During a visit to this atelier later in the day, I spot a table of ready-made designs, including a single diver’s flipper fabricated from blue suede and adorned with giant clear crystals. The most extravagant swimming accessory you could imagine, the shoe was conceived, Louboutin tells me, for a film character who is “a mythical mermaid”.
The house of Christian Louboutin is founded on fairytales. As a teenager, he would sneak into the Folies Bergère (after discovering the ushers vanished after the first interval) to watch the dancing girls perform. He set his mind to designing footwear for them, and to this day he talks of “les silhouettes théâtrale” – shapes informed by the poetry of dance and movement. The showgirl element to his work is self-evident, with sky-high boots and heels covered in studs, rhinestones, crystals and more recently graffiti; cast in every colour and material imaginable from lace and velour to shearling and Perspex.
The word Louboutins has long since been a synecdoche for sexy, seductive shoes: some are timeless classics, such his lean, elegant Pigalle courts and peep-toed Very Privé pumps; others are far kinkier with towering six-inch heels, snaking bondage-style ankle straps, fetishistic ‘wet-look’ patent finishes and long spikes like embedded ninja stars on the tips and spines of stilettos. He is also arguably the father of the luxury thigh-high boot.
Conversely, Louboutin designs discreet and delicate shoes, too. Flats are engineered to compliment the body’s natural alignment, to lend grace and elegance to movement. “When a shoe is flat, it is all about the angles, the lines of the ankle, the top of the foot,” he tells me from behind a long wooden desk in his first-floor office on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which can only be described as a Wunderkammer of mad and magical things. On the way up, I pass a stuffed gazelle standing majestically on its hind legs, head tilted to one side like an anthropomorphic can-can dancer.
Louboutin is famed for his colourful anecdotes about growing up in Paris: his love of the theatre and cinema as a child; glamorous nuits blanches spent at the celebrated Parisian nightclub Le Palace as a young man, and his thirst for exploration in his early twenties, which led him to far-flung places, including six months in India. In those formative years, he worked for various well-known houses, including stints at Dior and Charles Jourdan. He got his pay cheque and skipped the country when he pleased. He started thinking seriously about work only when he was hired in 1988 by Roger Vivier, the man credited with inventing the stiletto heel.
Louboutin has described Vivier as both a mentor and a friend, someone who encouraged his appetite for adventure, and whose shoes perfectly captured a sense of nostalgia and grandeur while pushing the boundaries of modernity. Surprisingly, Louboutin subsequently made a sideways move to become a landscape gardener, a transition that makes more sense when he explains his passion for colour in relation to botany, still a big passion of his. “When I close my eyes,” the designer says, “I see combinations in terms of plants. So maybe a euphorbia, which is a very light jade green, with a very dark dahlia. I am much more connected to the colours of a garden or landscape than, say, those in a painting.”
In 1992, encouraged by his friend Eric Philippe, a well-respected Parisian antiques dealer, he opened his first shop, at the entrance to the Galerie Véro-Dodat, an early 19th-century covered arcade. The women’s boutique has maintained its large window front on the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the green-clad store is today twinned with a matching Louboutin men’s boutique on the opposite side of the gallery’s arch – literally acting as an architectural gateway to the maison’s historic roots.
Christian Louboutin has so many stories that it’s hard to know where to begin, but sat at his desk, sipping a single espresso, he seems surprisingly relaxed. Opposite him, on the other side of the room, is a giant Steiff teddy bear covered in white and blue rhinestones, one paw tagged with the swirly Louboutin signature. On the walls hang cinematic photographs: a picture of a young Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra; a black-and-white photo of the actress Eva Ionesco – a close friend – in one of her famously precocious Lolita poses as a child. He’s surrounded by books, and behind him is a wall-to-ceiling pinboard covered in cut-out images, notes, postcards, fragments of material and his own drawings. He points to a large sculpture of a horse’s head, cast in pretty turquoise ceramic with a white rope for a rein: “This was a Christmas present, but I have yet to take it home!” The designer’s schedule is relentless; since unveiling his AW18 men’s collection in Paris two days ago, he’s been in and out of photoshoots and has finalised his imminent AW18 women’s presentation.
“I am not a superstitious person,” he reveals when quizzed further on his unusual antiques and office décor. “I would not go out of my way to prove that I am not superstitious either, though. I do have a good friend who is very much like this. She is a very quiet person, and the only time she raised her voice at me was about 20 years ago. I had made a chain on the back of some shoes with a little skeleton, and I had done some prints with skeletons, too. She looked at me and shouted, ‘I forbid you! You are not to have this, because it is a representation of death.’ She was so intent that I agreed not to make them. Since then, I have never put skulls on my designs.”
While he’s not superstitious, Louboutin places a lot of importance on loyalty, especially when it comes to friends and family. “My father was not a big talker, but when people speak less, you have more memories of what they have said,” he says when we touch upon the subject of fate and how he seemed destined for a glamorous life in fashion. “He was a carpenter and one day he showed me his wooden workbench and said, ‘Christian, if you want to sculpt from this wood, you must go in the direction of the grain. This is how to make something beautiful. If you go against it, you will have splinters.’ I was only 12, but I took this as a metaphor for life: to always go with the current, and to bear in mind it does not always flow straight.”
Louboutin maintains he was never swept away by the allure of the fashion world as a young designer. “Some people have a dream to work in the fashion industry. Me, I was never interested. Once, I sat next to a journalist on a plane who told me that American Vogue was her style bible when she was a girl. I realised that I had never looked at a fashion magazine while growing up. I liked clothes because I liked movies and the Folies Bergère. I remember the dresses of Elizabeth Taylor in all her movies, and also films like Peau d’Âne [or Donkey Skin, the 1970 Jacques Demy musical starring Catherine Deneuve] where the dresses are meant to depict the weather, the sun and the moon. I knew Yves Saint Laurent through Belle de Jour, not because of the maison. All my fashion references are from cinema.”
Louboutin’s designs often have wonderful backstories that highlight his love of storytelling and escapism. He describes his shoes with dancing hands, occasionally striking together his fingertips. “Tack, tack, tack,” he says as he gestures. He makes it all look so simple, as if merely connecting Lego bricks. It is his fearless, unabashed approach that makes Louboutin so unique. No other shoe designer glides so seamlessly between the worlds of subdued elegance and baroque excess; from sexy and sophisticated to showgirl spectacular to downright crazy, with some platforms and wedges so high they would surely be deemed a health hazard by those working in podiatry.
He shows me his original Love flats, a pair of classic black-and-white square-toed pumps designed as part of his AW92 collection and inspired by a picture of a wistful-looking Diana, Princess of Wales, sitting in front of the Taj Mahal. Louboutin thought the princess looked sad, so conceived the perfect shoes to lift her mood. The word Love is split between the shoes and can be read when the feet come together. The SS18 re-editions – available in three iterations, including black patent with red lettering – have been updated with rounder tips and a more cursive Love above the bridge of the foot; this time, the O makes a heart shape when the shoes connect, just like a friendship locket. The story of Diana’s now iconic shoes is just one of many romantic anecdotes. “I have a friend who is still so in love with her husband, after 25 years!” Louboutin says playfully, rolling his eyes. “He is a writer, and because she is always on platforms, I decided that it would be nice to enclose one of his letters in the soles of her shoes, like she is floating on the love of her husband.” There’s a pause. “Of course, the letter was ruined when we cast the resin platforms – horribly, horribly burned!” he laughs. “So I used a lock of his hair, a pen and flower petals instead.” He later expanded this idea, creating shoes with see-through platforms housing tiny hydrangea heads.
Some designs don’t even make it to the drawing board, however. “I am not a fan of the very skinny mid heel,” he explains, shaking his head. “With flat shoes, you can admire the top shape of the foot and the profile; you look at the lines of the ankle.” He traces a right angle with his finger. “With high heels, you can look from any direction and it changes the look of the leg, but with these mid skinny heels, it is just like a tétine [a child’s dummy] at the back of the heel,” he declares in mock disgust. The designer has another interesting idiosyncrasy: “I never wear sneakers all day. J’étouffe! I suffocate! It is really a very physical response, not at all a phobia. It is strange, but I can only wear leather soles all day.”
Which brings us to the question of women’s trainers, possibly the most surprising addition to the Louboutin range in recent years, especially given how he talks about a shoe’s curvature in relation to sexual empowerment and female confidence. So, can trainers on a woman – even Louboutin ones – be sexy?
“No” is his first answer, although he takes a moment to reconsider. “Well, it depends on the personality of the woman. Fashion doesn’t always bring sexuality or sensuality. To be sexy, shoes should fade into a woman’s silhouette. But then, I don’t say that people should be sexy all the time; it should not always be the ultimate goal.”
He may be right, but committed fans of Louboutin’s super-fine stilettos, sky-high platforms and thigh-skimming boots are perfectly entitled to disagree.
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