Christian Louboutin: ‘When I started to see it come together, it was almost 40 years of work. I’ve got a legacy’
Christian Louboutin: 'When I started to see it come together, it was almost 40 years of work. I've got a legacy' What happens when Christian Louboutin takes his foot off the gas? Two pivotal new partnerships, that's what. In the wake of a deal that values his legacy at almost £2 billion and a major new A-list collaboration, we ask France's famous sole man why slowing down hasn't, well, slowed him down... Teo van den Broeke When it comes to designer shoes, Christian Louboutin has the monopoly on fun. Sure, Manolo Blahnik, Louboutin's Canarian luxury footwear contemporary, has the market cornered on elegance and Jimmy Choo's arguably got the edge on sex, but when it comes to naughty, silly, upbeat (albeit ultra-expensive) on-foot fun, Chrissy Loub – as he's colloquially referred to in this country's better-heeled shoe emporiums – is your man.
"It's a simple concept to have fun with what you wear," the French-Egyptian designer tells me seriously when we meet over Zoom at the tail end of the UK's third lockdown. Louboutin is in his office in Paris' glitzy 1st arrondissement and his perfectly bald head is surrounded by a halo of postcards and other aesthetically pleasing paraphernalia, including a note from his late friend Kobe Bryant ("Kobe was a great mind, a great soul, great athlete") and a photograph of his "idol", Dolly Parton. We're here to talk about his new collaborative collection with Idris and Sabrina Elba, but first he wants to discuss, well, everything else. "There's nothing wrong with having fun. Not looking like you're coming out of a box is not a bad thing. I'm serious in one thing: with my work. My world is that of entertainment, luxury and pleasure, so this is what I take seriously."
Louboutin – who speaks excellent English in long, lyrical sentences – spent much of the first wave of the pandemic at his house in the beach town of Comporta in Portugal (he also has homes in Paris, the Vendée, Brazil and a houseboat in Egypt), where he retreated to see out the lockdowns with his young twin daughters and their mother, a close friend of many years. "To be perfectly honest, I didn't dislike the experience of lockdown," Louboutin tells me as we settle in. "I'm perfectly aware that for most people it's been really awful, but for me it has been good that things slowed down. I sort of needed to – not to step down, but to slow down, in order to do better. It means that you have more time to think creatively, because you are doing less travelling and not doing a million things at once."
The past three decades have been busy for Louboutin, who celebrated his 58th birthday in January, though he doesn't look a day over 45 (he may have discovered Zoom's fabled "smooth skin feature", though I suspect that's not his style). The designer and entrepreneur started his women's business in 1991, following stints working with legendary créateurs de chaussures Charles Jourdan and Roger Vivier and a period spent as a freelance footwear designer for labels such as Yves Saint Laurent. The towering stiletto heels and dangerous-looking platform shoes he produced under his own name were instant hits with the teetering classes – Princess Caroline Of Monaco was his first customer and the likes of Madonna and Catherine Deneuve followed soon after. It wasn't until 1993, however, that Louboutin's signature, a demonstration of his innate dedication to fun, his defining cherry-red lacquered sole, saw the light of his first boutique in Paris' Galerie Véro-Dodat.
"My sketches were not reproduced exactly as I had designed them and I couldn't figure out why," Louboutin told creative journal Artflyer in 2015. "The two-dimensional sketch was so powerful on paper, but when turned into a three-dimensional object, it was somehow lacking energy. Frustrated after having tried different things to liven up the design, I spontaneously grabbed my assistant's red nail polish and painted the sole. I instantly knew that this would be a success." The rest, as they say, is fashion history.
In the following decades, Louboutin's shoes – from the sassy-yet-classy black patent "Pigalle" pump to the ankle-threatening "Very Prive" platforms – became synonymous with a certain breed of scene-stealer, a woman who wants to be seen and feel sexy, naturellement, but also one determined not to be taken too seriously. Cardi B rapped about her preferred "red bottoms" in her 2017 hit "Bodak Yellow" and the Sex And The City wardrobe department was famously required to pay Louboutin for the (many) pairs of his shoes that featured in the show; other designers were willing to give theirs away for free.
Arguably, it's this singular approach to his craft that has resulted in the extraordinary global success Louboutin celebrates today. He has around 150 stores and brand outlets in 30 countries worldwide and in March it was announced he would be selling a 24 per cent stake in his eponymous brand to Exor – the Agnelli family-owned holding company with interests in Ferrari and Juventus football club – for £460 million, valuing his company at around £1.9 billion and boosting his personal wealth to a reported £850m. It was a bold move in a year when most brands who deal in the kind of "look at me" luxury in which Louboutin specialises were hunkering down and waiting for the Covid-19 storm to pass, but he wasn't going to let a pesky thing like a global pandemic stop his pursuit of world domination.
"I was planning to strike a deal like the one we just did with Exor for quite a while, specifically around the time I started to work on my exhibition – which opened in 2020 at Palais De La Porte Dorée [in Paris] – almost three years ago," he tells me, with an unguarded ease that belies his status as a high-fashion plutocrat. "When I started to see the body of work come together I thought, 'My God, you know. I've got a legacy.' There was almost 40 years of work there. An exhibition is almost like a visualisation of a chapter, which means a new chapter needs to be opened." He continues: "The opportunity with Exor arrived at a moment when I thought, 'Well, the company is in really good condition, so we could have an active partner to get involved and help us write this new chapter.' My main concern, however, was that we didn't want to be paternalised by our partner, but rather we need to be fraternalised, which is an entirely different thing."
With so much rip-roaring global success already under his studded belt, I'm intrigued to know what Louboutin hopes Exor – a company with few fashion interests to speak of, other than Chinese luxury group Shang Xia – will bring to the table. "There are three aspects that the Exor merger will help us with," Louboutin explains. "Sustainability, our digital presence and engagement, and we need to focus on one market in particular – where we already have a few stores but need to be present in a bigger volume – and that's China." Will he be relinquishing any creative control, I wonder. A common side-effect of big group buyouts is fashion designers being forced to dilute their vision somewhat. "I will pretty much be more creatively engaged," he tells me flatly. "I was talking to my friends and they were asking me, 'Are you going to have less work?' I said, 'Basically I've signed up for more work!'"  Christian Louboutin at L'Exhibition[niste], his 2020 show at Palais De La Porte Dorée in Paris One key area of business in which Louboutin has seen impressive growth is that of men's shoes, turnover from which has increased by about 30 per cent in the past five years. They were a late addition to his wider portfolio, introduced in 2011, but in the decade since, the designer has established himself as the go-to brand for men looking to make a statement with their footwear. Trainers are spike-coated – a second-tier Louboutin signature – slippers are Swarovski crystal-encrusted and, naturally, all soles are finished in his trademarked shade of red, Pantone 18-1663 TPX.
Louboutin's odyssey into the realm of men's shoes started when Mika, the Lebanese-British singer of "Grace Kelly" and "Big Girl" fame, asked him to create all the footwear for his first tour in 2007. Louboutin, who had never designed men's shoes prior to that ("I didn't feel I had anything to add to the conversation") met the challenge head-on. "Mika told me, 'When a woman puts on your shoes she gets transformed and there's this obvious excitement. I want you to do the same thing for me when I'm on stage as you do for those women.'"
When I suggest that this theatricality is still infused throughout Louboutin's men's collections to this day, he's quick to agree. "When I design for women I often think of her performing. That performance doesn't have to be for 10,000 people. You can perform for your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, but basically my shoes are for people who like that excitement about the shoes they wear. So I transplanted that idea when designing for men. Men are often seen as more conservative, but I thought, 'I'm not going to touch that. I'm going to focus on this person who wants to perform,' and after that it was extremely easy for me to design, to think of this man on a stage and to break that idea of conservatism. It was completely easy."
It's fair to say Louboutin started designing men's shoes at just the right time. His first collection was unveiled just a year after the launch of Instagram (anyone who spends more than two minutes on the platform knows its users love nothing more than a conspicuous fashion shoe) and, latterly, Louboutin's growth in the men's arena coincided with the burgeoning gender fluidity movement of the mid-2010s, a period that saw the nonbinary visions of designers such as Alessandro Michele at Gucci – by way of his earthly conduit Harry Styles – and younger creatives such as Charles Jeffrey legitimise flamboyant fashion for men in a very tangible way. It's a shift, I suggest, that must have seriously benefitted the trajectory of Louboutin's business.
"The masculine mentality has pretty much completely changed in the past decade," he agrees. "You now have a lot of men who are excited by fashion in the way that women have long been. They buy things they don't necessarily feel like they need to keep for ten years but that they want to wear immediately. They need it now." He pauses. "With my men's collections I thought, 'I'm going to focus on this new man, who buys things by instinct.' The more you're free, the more people respond to that freedom."
This notion of luck is central to Louboutin's story. A freewheeling, creative child born into a modest Parisian family, his mother, Irene, was a housewife and his father, Roger, a cabinet maker. Louboutin spent more of his late 1970s adolescence dancing in Paris' Le Palace nightclub and watching shows at the Folies Bergère than he did in school – he was expelled three times, in fact – and, by his own admission, he never expected "to need to work", let alone become a globally recognised footwear designer responsible for, at last count, around 2,000 employees.
"A lot of people say to me, 'Oh, wow, you have all this energy and you have so much enthusiasm," he says, laughing, "but that's just down to chance. I was born like that. I'm very happy, but I was born happy. It's sad because not everyone is born happy," he continues at pace. "Also, I was raised during the 1970s, when there was this amazing innocence. I had my first boyfriend at 13 and there was never a problem. Everything was genuine. I was expelled from school at 16 and had zero concept of working. The only concept I had was that I had two legs to dance with." He laughs. "There were no role models representing wealth back then, not like there are today. These days, magazines celebrate business people. Why? Back then it was just about creativity. Money was not that important. Feeling bad because you had no money was not an issue."
It's this sense of genuine generosity and creativity, I think, that makes each pair of Louboutin shoes feel not only special – like upbeat on-foot talismans – but also, in turn, worth the enormous price tags they sport (loafers go for upwards of £600, while a pair of his razor-toed Chelsea boots will set you back more than £900). Louboutin's AW21 collection, for instance, which the designer showed digitally from a virtual reality private jet, "Loubi Airways", was full to the vents with jazzy, back-to-life pieces, including a backless slipper in chartreuse velvet and a faux-shearling and spike-covered Chelsea boot, which looked like something a go-go dancer moonlighting as a shepherd might wear for a night out at Le Palace.
It's a much documented fact that over the past year our collective approach to dressing has pivoted in a relatively seismic way in the direction of ease and comfort. So ingrained is our current obsession with function over form that the global athleisure market is expected to break a staggering £300bn by the end of 2021. I can't help but wonder what impact the shift has had on Louboutin – whose entire business model is built on selling sexed-up, party-ready footwear – and the kind of shoes he designs.
"When a negative period of life has just finished, you don't want to keep digging through the nightmare you've just lived," he tells me, thoughtfully. "I remember signing shoes in America just after the financial crisis in 2009. There was a reporter who came up to me and asked whether I thought that signing shoes during a crisis was indecent. I said, 'No. I think it would be indecent to mourn and be sad and design black shoes and reflect the world we're living in.' What would that give to the person? Nothing special. No excitement." He pauses. "On that I'm very serious. The one thing I'm mature about is that it's not my job to bring more sadness to a world that is already struggling."
When the Black Lives Matter movement reached full tilt in the first half of 2020, Louboutin was both saddened and struck by the stories of systemic racial discrimination that began simmering to the surface. "As everyone knows, it was a tough moment and shocking," he says. "It was in your face. It was difficult to veil yourself from it and think of something else." In the wake of George Floyd's death, specifically, the designer took to Instagram and quickly found himself watching a discussion between his friend Idris Elba, Elba's wife, Sabrina, and one of the founders of the BLM movement, Opal Tometi. The three were discussing their own experiences as people of colour and as Louboutin watched he decided there and then that he wanted to do something meaningful to help the cause.
"Sometimes Idris sends me shoe designs and asks me what I think," he says now. "So I said to him, 'You know, I think we should do something related to Black Lives Matter. Let's work together with Sabrina to do a collection and everything should be dedicated to the causes around it.' So Idris asked me to call him back the day after, when he would be with Sabrina, on his birthday, because he wanted my idea to be his birthday present. So I called them back the next day to suggest the idea that we design a collection together. She laughed and shouted, 'Ah, that's the best present ever!'"
The resulting collection, released this summer, is titled Walk A Mile In My Shoes and features a wide range of styles, including Louboutin's classic Vieira tennis shoe and his low-slung Dandelion slipper, a selection of which feature interpretations of the plant "Mandela's Gold", while others, finished in black, are embroidered with the name of the collection in Louboutin red. The most important thing about the collection, however, is that 100 per cent of the profits will be going to five of the Elbas' favoured causes, including Immediate Theatre, an East London arts-for-all initiative, and anti-child incarceration charity The Gathering For Justice. "With this collection I have the possibility, alongside Sabrina and Idris, to do something dedicated to something that is not the thing I do every day," explains Louboutin. "So for that I need to give myself fully, the way that Idris and Sabrina give themselves fully. Therefore, of course, we must give all the profits to charity."
"Christian was a dream to work with," says Idris. "He was truly collaborative, encouraging and showed a real interest in our design concepts. We share the intention of using our platforms to play a small part in securing change. Our chosen charities are a reflection of that, as they look to help people, especially the young. These are the people that will benefit from our collaboration."
Louboutin's phone starts to ring off screen for the second time – "It's this number from Fiji," he says. "I've got no idea who it is" – and I can sense his publicist trying to catch his attention from behind the monitor, so before he disappears in a puff of cherry-red smoke, I ask the man behind the soles one final question: "Christian, who was the more accomplished designer, Idris or Sabrina?" Louboutin's response, which follows a burst of laughter, is both generous and measured. "Sabrina has been looking at everything related to textiles, fabrics, things coming from Africa. So she's been doing a lot of research. She was also the one who did all the research with the freedom flowers and the symbols in the collection." A pause. "And Idris has been more involved in the shape. You know, he loves cars and I always think a good car designer would be a great male shoe designer."
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