In 2008, in a cave in Armenia, scientists discovered what is thought to be the world’s oldest leather shoe, a fifty-five-hundred-year-old cowhide moccasin—a woman’s size 7—with laces and straw padding. But, somewhere between the Chalcolithic age and the Kardashians, shoes went from abetting to embellishing, and even impeding, the feet as a way of getting from one place to another. (The offices of fashion magazines often smell like locker rooms, owing to the rows of stale sneakers and ballerina flats that lurk beneath the desks of carless career women.) To Louboutin, shoes are less interesting for their physical properties than for their psychological ones. A shoe can be an icebreaker, or an inkblot. Louboutin said one day, in the course of praising a Viennese fetish boot from the nineteenth century, “A shoe has so much more to offer than just to walk.”
Louboutin sells more than five hundred thousand pairs of shoes a year, at prices ranging from three hundred and ninety-five dollars, for an espadrille, to six thousand, for a “super-platform” pump covered in thousands of crystals. 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, and that of serendipity to their beholder. Like Louis XIV’s red heels, they signal a sort of sumptuary code, promising a world of glamour and privilege.
They are also a marketing gimmick that renders an otherwise indistinguishable product instantly recognizable. Still, he has elicited the most frenzied attention to soles since the days of Adlai Stevenson. People make marriage proposals in his boutiques. There is a Louboutin manicure, in which the underside of the nail is painted with scarlet polish. On “So You Think You Can Dance,” Jennifer Lopez emerged from a giant shoe and performed a song called “Louboutins”: “Watch these red bottoms / And the back of my jeans / Watch me go, bye baby.”
Louboutin’s aesthetic is part Marie Antoinette and part the Mummers. He has covered shoes in gold studs (a recent boot brought to mind an abacus), dotted them with googly eyes (he got the idea from a greeting card), and topped them with plumes (a pointy-toed stiletto looks as if it had tussled with Tweety Bird). But, beyond adornment, what draws the eye to the Louboutin foot is its silhouette. On a shoe he made last year, a spike juts from the top of the foot like a rhinoceros horn. A parabolic pump called the Daffodil appears to have been conceived in a fun-house mirror. Louboutin is fond of protrusions and cantilevers, of big toe boxes like the prows of ships, of bulging heel cups and plunging cleavage (his décolleté is that of the toes).
One of his most popular designs is the Very Privé, a sinuous high heel with an open toe and an extreme, hidden platform. Before the Very Privé, which he first issued in 2006, Louboutin was less well known than his main competitor, Manolo Blahnik. The Very Privé was Louboutin’s iPod, its futuristic contours rendering everything that came before it fuddy-duddy. With several swoops of his pen, he had managed to make 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. The Louboutin woman might order a rare hamburger. “I’ll do shoes for the lady who lunches, but it would be, like, a really nasty lunch, talking about men,” Louboutin said. “But where I draw the line, what I absolutely won’t do, is the lady who plays bridge in the afternoon!”
