This is a great article I posted on my site myfashioncents.com and the April issue of the New Yorker magazine about shoe designer Christian Louboutin. In homage to the Surrealists, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin once created a pair of pumps with a hydrodynamic shape, a bulging eye above the pinkie toe, and tessellating rows of black and gold scales. For a private client, a mine owner, he made a pair of shoes with ruby soles.
To Louboutin, shoes are less interesting for their physical properties than for their psychological ones. He sells more than five hundred thousand pairs of shoes a year, at prices ranging from three hundred and ninety-five dollars to six thousand. The sole of each of his shoes is lacquered in a vivid, glossy red. The red soles offer the pleasure of secret knowledge to their wearer. They are also a marketing gimmick that renders an otherwise indistinguishable product instantly recognizable. One of his most popular designs is the Very Privé, a sinuous high heel with an open toe and an extreme, hidden platform. With several swoops of his pen, Louboutin has managed to make Manolo Blahnik’s princessy slingbacks look as if they were meant for ladies who spend their days eating charity lunches of chicken salad and melon balls. Louboutin believes in repelling preciousness with a sense of humor. Once, he made the straps of a sandal out of tape measures. At heart, he is a showguy, and his shoes are miniature stages. Louboutin is to Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau what Marc Jacobs is to Bleecker Street—the sovereign of an urban fiefdom
Read more www.newyorker.com
