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Star Light, Star Bright,
First star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have this shoe that shines so bright

…
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Christian Louboutin, the Parisian shoe designer famed for his slinky stilettos and towering platform shoes, has just opened a second London shop, in Mount Street, Mayfair. For all its rarefied location, the sprawling 1,000sq ft space, with shoes displayed like delectable coloured sweets in individual mirrored alcoves all along the wall, seems to encourage customers to cast off their inhibitions. In one corner two young Russian women try on pair after pair, from beige patent-leather Mary-Janes to black T-strap platform sandals with a silver conical heel, all of them bearing the same glossy, red leather soles and costing upwards of £400 each. The women pose unselfconsciously as they regard their prospective purchases in the mirrors, twisting and turning on a velvety carpet the exact same ruby red as those soles.

They don’t bat an eye when the man responsible for those longed-for shoes hurries in wearing fluorescent green Converse pumps, with a backpack slung over his shoulder, a small and unassuming figure with olive skin and close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair.

No matter that Louboutin’s shoes are worn by fashion’s early-adopters such as Kate Moss and Daphne Guinness, through to megastars like Beyoncé, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, that the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York dedicated an exhibition to his work earlier this year, or that in January Oprah Winfrey devoted a segment of her show to introducing her eight million viewers to Louboutin’s designs. Even with all this adulation, he still seems to prefer to let his shoes – rather than his own celebrity – do the talking.

‘I never think about it,’ the 43-year-old says in his musical French accent when I ask him how it feels to be one of the best-known names in shoe design. ‘I am working still the same way, I have the same office in Paris and I have my Vespa… It’s just like if you were ageing 10 years. When it’s your life every day, you don’t see it changing.’

For a designer whose shoes have gone from being a fashion insider’s secret, when his first boutique opened in Paris in 1992, to being coveted by women from London to Beijing, he’s surprisingly unfazed by the attention. Perhaps he is unaware of the excitement surrounding his name, seeing as he doesn’t have a television and says he’s ‘not a big magazine person’. Indeed, aside from the fact that he makes shoes for the likes of RM by Roland Mouret, Marchesa, Rodarte and Temperley, he says that his own work doesn’t look to fashion or celebrity for inspiration. ‘Everything inspires me but fashion,’ Louboutin says emphatically. ‘It’s probably one of the things that least inspires me. Only when I work with designers… Otherwise I never really think about clothes.’

To prove his point, he jumps up and plucks a silver, spike-heeled slingback called Discoteka from the wall, which has a sexy, silver ankle chain rather than a strap. He says it was inspired by ‘a girl going out to Studio 54 – it’s as simple as that’. The tuft of feathers on the toe of a pale-yellow silk platform sandal took its cue from an egg hatched by one of the chickens on his farm in the Vendée region of France, which arrived covered in little feathers. ‘I thought it would be nice to almost have an egg of feathers,’ he says with a smile.

And he conceived of his shoes’ trademark, their red soles, in an equally serendipitous manner. When his assistant was painting her nails with a scarlet nail polish, he seized the bottle and added the red polish to the sole on a drawing of a shoe he was working on. ‘It was a drawing for me, [but] quite quickly it became a trademark… I saw that it was an element of flirt,’ he says, explaining how his clients would often remark on how men were attracted to the red soles. ‘It was no longer in my hands. It happened to become my identity.’

This whimsical approach to design belies Louboutin’s steely work ethic. Until recently he had overseen the production of every pair of shoes since he set up his business 15 years ago, and only last year hired someone to take over the management of the company. In 2007 his business boasted retail sales of £132 million, and this year the designer is set to open stores in Las Vegas, Singapore and Jakarta.

‘I cannot say that I have a real boundary between the moment I’m working and the moment I am on holiday. I sketch wherever I am,’ he says. He’s also a perfectionist. ‘I think that’s where there’s a difference between my shoes and other shoes – I constantly recast, look at them, reshape. It’s not only a design, it’s a shoe. Meaning, if it has to be corrected 10 times, it will be corrected.’

This drive isn’t surprising, given that Louboutin left school at 16, upping sticks from Paris – where he was brought up in a family of four sisters by his mother and father, a skilled carpenter – to Romans-sur-Isère, the centre of France’s footwear industry, to become an apprentice at Charles Jourdan’s shoe factory. He’d been inspired to design shoes by the showgirls at the Paris nightclub The Palace – a haunt of Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent and Grace Jones in the 1970s. From the age of 12 he regularly sneaked out of school to watch rehearsals. ‘I would go to school, but I was dreaming and drifting, I was not there any more,’ says Louboutin. ‘[The showgirls] influenced me a lot. If you like high heels, it’s really the ultimate high heel – it’s all about the legs, how they carry themselves, the embellishment of the body. They are the ultimate icons.’

A polymath who counts gardening, travel and hunting for antiques among his extracurricular activities, does he now regret leaving school so young? ‘Everyone was against me, [saying], “You have to learn.” I thought, “If everyone is against me, they may be right.” And then I watched TV, and Sophia Loren introduced her sister, saying she had to leave school when she was 12 but when she turned 50 she got her degree. Everybody applauded! And I thought, “Well, at least if I regret it I’m going to be like the sister of Sophia Loren!” But I’ve never regretted it, actually.’ He grins.

Other incidents piqued his interest during his formative years. Visiting the Musée des Colonies in Paris, he saw a sign showing a high-heeled shoe with a red line through it, indicating that women couldn’t wear heels on the museum’s floors. Soon after he followed a pair of high heels down a Paris street, entranced, only to be shooed off by their owner’s pimp.

These influences have translated into some giddily high stilettos, with heels that can measure up to seven inches. Can they possibly be comfortable? ‘It is important because I feel suffering to be beautiful doesn’t make any sense,’ says Louboutin. ‘A shoe, it needs to be pretty, but you shouldn’t suffer. Happiness is much nicer.’ He adds that many of his designs have a hidden platform, so, though the heel may be seven inches, ‘the reality is that you’re perched on five inches. If you like high heels, then five inches you can walk in. People with a high arch are easily walking in them.’

And while Louboutin prefers designing a vertiginous heel to a flat, he says, ‘I’m not a fascist. I would never oblige people to wear high heels if they don’t like it.’ Indeed, his sisters – whom he says were an influence on his work – aren’t even particularly enamoured of high heels. ‘They always complain that I don’t have enough flat shoes,’ he says with a rueful smile. ‘They’re not so much into shoes.’

While Louboutin doesn’t seem to distinguish between his work and private life, he does find time for some quirky pastimes. After seeing the 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire he decided to learn how to swing on a trapeze and still has a trapeze in his studio. He trained as a landscape gardener before starting his company and is constantly working on his Vendée garden, as well as touring his favourite British gardens, such as those at Hidcote and Powis Castle. Does he ever think about quitting his hectic schedule for a quieter life of gardening? ‘When you like what you do, why stop?’ he asks. ‘I feel very privileged doing something I always wanted to do.’

He is determined to keep focused on what he excels at. So far he’s only veered from shoes to design a line of handbags, which launched in 2003, and is aghast at the idea of ever doing a clothing range or men’s shoes. ‘Not interested,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I was approached to be a clothes designer [once]. I said, “Are you crazy, why would you even consider that?” And they said, “Well, you have a name.”‘ Louboutin gives a Gallic roll of the eyes. ‘There are so many good designers, so why would I put my name on clothes when I never wanted to do it?’

Nor is he tempted to cash in on his business. ‘I’m not very ambitious, in the sense that I don’t wish to have five cars, 20 houses, a plane… You sell your company if you have big needs, but there’s nothing I need that I don’t have,’ he says. ‘I think that, as a designer, what’s coming out of my drawings is a certain sense of freedom, and losing that has a repercussion in your work. It’s not a nasty thing to be free.’

Famed shoemaker Christian Louboutin has turned out heels in leather and silk,but he’s adding a new material to his portfolio: glass.

For a new collaboration with champagne-maker Piper-Heidsieck, Louboutin created a glass slipper that connotes both Cinderella fantasy and Parisian decadence. The shoe flute is packaged as part of the $500 Le Rituel gift set, which also includes a bottle of champagne. It will only be sold in select Neiman Marcus stores!

Drinking out of a lady’s shoe is a tradition that dates to the 1880s, when Russian counts celebrated ballerinas by drinking out of their toe shoes. Later, the tradition was picked in Belle Epoque Paris on the stages of the Folies Bergere and other cabarets.

“There is something a little bit corny of drinking out of a shoe,” Louboutin says. He wanted to suggest something sweeter. “I thought of Cinderella,  so the shoe became a symbol of the lost person.”

“I started very precisely [working] with the shape of 17th century glass that was not dedicated to Champagne but for liquor,” Louboutin says. It was a Portugese glass that he twisted into a heel, and then attached a shoe. (The shoe does not reference a specific shoe.)

Louboutin blushed slightly when asked if he had ever sipped bubbly from a lady’s shoe. “Yes,  I did. Very bad experience,” he says. “It’s provocative. It’s odd for women [if you] drink out of their shoes. It’s nothing you would do to just any woman.”