It’s 30 years since Christian Louboutin painted his first pair of soles red with nail varnish — now, everyone from Beyoncé to the Princess of Wales wears them. My shoes are about flirtation, he tells Karen Dacre.
As a firm believer in the theory that you can tell a lot
By the time our 90-minute breakfast meeting has come to an end, France’s best-loved shoe designer has exchanged travel tips with the maître d’ and made a friend for life in the waitress, with whom he swaps charm and amusing quips for seamless service and a second bowl of his favourite breakfast order (granola topped with rhubarb), which she insists on fetching from the restaurant next door. Nothing is too much trouble for Monsieur Louboutin.
It helps that we’re in Claridge’s — a home from home for Louboutin — where the 59-year-old super-cobbler is basically royalty. On the evening of our meeting he will attend the Animal Ball, a masked gala attended by Queen Camilla (“Is it OK to call her that?” he asks), before falling into bed in his favourite suite.
“I do feel understood here,” he says in his smooth French accent while snapping a photo of the ceiling on his phone (we’re dining in the newly refurbished restaurant). “I love the familiarity.”
Consistency is a theme for Louboutin, who has made a multimillion-dollar business out of doing what he does best. His shoes, recognisable by their red soles, are worn by everyone from Beyoncé to the Princess of Wales.
More than just a pair of heels, “Loubis” are something of a cultural icon too. “The sole is a point of silent recognition between women all over the world,” the designer says. “Showing yours is a sort of flirtation.”
Louboutin is delighted with what his shoes (regularly chosen as rite-of-passage gifts for graduating teenagers and brides seeking the perfect wedding shoes) have come to stand for. “They are more than just shoes, they mean something to people. That makes me very happy,” he says.
Raised by his parents Roger, a cabinet-maker, and Irène, who looked after Christian and his three sisters, Louboutin is a lifelong shoe obsessive who started out sketching heels in his bedroom at a young age.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.With little formal training (he was expelled from school and never attended fashion college), Louboutin completed an apprenticeship in the atelier of Roger Vivier before freelancing for luxury houses including Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. The Christian Louboutin brand was born in 1991 and its celebrated red soles were launched two years later. “It wasn’t always red,” he says of the colour that is as synonymous with his brand as the two interlocking Cs are with the house of Chanel. “At one point I thought I’d change it every season, maybe try green for Christmas. But I painted some red nail polish onto a sole and something special happened.”
Parisians — who were “obsessed with black” at the time, Louboutin says — took to the red sole instantly. “It was like a game of hide and seek for them. They could show it or they could choose not to.”
His shoes, which span everything from the spike stilettos for which he is best known to the bestselling flat slippers and brogues, have a customer base that is nothing if not expansive.
Louboutins are loved by everyone including Cardi B (at one point the rapper was reportedly buying a pair every two weeks) and cast members of The Only Way Is Essex. He is delighted with the support. “I don’t want to control how people wear my shoes. If I did, I’d design clothes for them to wear with them,” he says.
Louboutin’s dynamic fanbase (“People come up to me at events and call me a legend,” he says, without a hint of irony) reflects his dynamic shoe offering, where leopard-print Cuban-heeled boots sit alongside vertiginous stilettos that retail for up to £800.
He is quick to remind me that his brand has always been about more than high heels. One of the first styles he designed was the Love shoe, a flat slipper he has previously said was inspired by Princess Diana.
“In those early days we sold more flats than anything else, then it became heels and now it’s balanced. More and more women have come back round to heels in recent years. They don’t want towering ones, though — women have real lives.”
His current collection includes trainers, loafers and ballet flats, all of which are designed with hectic schedules in mind. The women who have worked with him since the beginning at his brand’s Parisian HQ on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau are a constant source of inspiration for the designer. He also learns a lot from his daughters — he parents 8-year-old twins with “a good friend” — who were the catalyst for a line of children’s shoes, launched last year.
I ask if becoming a father has inspired him to design from a more practical point of view. Louboutin raises an eyebrow and leans in to let me in on a secret: “I’m afraid to say my kids wear Crocs. They begged me for them.”
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.I’m not surprised to hear that the designer who gave us toe cleavage and 6in spike heels is not a fan of the rubber clogs that have become a global trend. Comfort is not a Louboutin signature. “I want people to feel confident in my shoes, of course, but comfort implies something else. The idea of a comfortable shoe is a bit like a comfortable relationship. It doesn’t exactly say passion. If comfort is your deepest motivation you might as well wear your pyjamas.”
For Louboutin, who is well versed in dressing women for awards ceremonies and live performances (he created footwear for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift’s most recent tours and has also designed shoes for the Parisian cabaret company Crazy Horse), the “right” pair of shoes is the pair you can forget you are wearing.
As for his favourite customer of all time? “Tina stands apart from the rest for me,” he says of Tina Turner, who died earlier this year. “She was an incredible woman and an incredible talent. She taught me what it meant to be glamorous.”
Louboutin credits growing up in Sixties Paris amid a collective obsession with hippy culture and Neil Young for his longstanding hunger for glamour. “There was this whole idea then that wearing no makeup and dressing grungy somehow made you a more serious person. I could never understand why a woman who likes to do her hair and wear make-up should be considered stupid.”
He remains the go-to guy for glamour but (after one too many ruptured achilles tendon stories) advises caution to his customers when it comes to sky-high heels: “I always say go for it, but if you want to go high you’ve got to be able to go low too.”
The big business of sky-high heels has served Louboutin well. A keen traveller, he has homes in Portugal, western France, Egypt (where his biological father is from) and Paris. He is also an avid shopper: “I collect beautiful things. On every trip I’m in every market and every antiques store. You only regret what you don’t have, so if I see something I like I tend to go for it.”
Among his most recent purchases — along with the Dries Van Noten shirt he is wearing during our interview — is a third property in Portugal, which the designer has recently turned into a hotel. Louboutin’s first hospitality business, located near his home in Melides on the Alentejo coast, opened earlier this year.
“I was planning to open a restaurant and the mayor of the town suggested I do a hotel, so I went with it,” Louboutin says, who talks about new business ventures in the way us normals might describe shopping for a new mascara. “I’m quite impulsive — I tend to do things then analyse afterwards.”
It’s a dangerous way to operate, but Louboutin has never spent much time worrying about the bottom line. “With me it’s never about making a smart business move, it’s about keeping the fun alive and reconnecting with what I love. I think, generally in life, you should do things because you really love to do them. Then you are never wasting your time.”
This article originally appeared in the Times of London.
Written by: Karen Dacre
© THE TIMES OF LONDON
