Most designers learn their craft in the ateliers of more seasoned masters, but shoe designer Christian Louboutin found his calling as a 17-year-old apprentice in the dressing rooms of Paris’ famous cabaret the Folies Bergère. “I would watch the girls going up and down the stairs with these very heavy headdresses on, and they never looked at their shoes,” he says. “That’s where I learned that shoes are all about posture and proportion.”

Showgirls of all kinds–from Tina Turner to Nicole Kidman–are still an inspiration for Louboutin, 44, whose instantly recognizable red-soled stilettos have become de rigueur on the red carpet and among Hollywood’s A-list crowd. “He is the foremost shoe designer in the world,” says Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where his designs were the subject of a recent retrospective, “Sole Desire.”

Louboutin spent the early years of his career designing shoes for some of fashion’s biggest names, including Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Maud Frizon. In 1992 he opened up his own shop at the end of a picturesque 19th century Parisian arcade. He still runs his business from that Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau address, but now his shoes are sold in 46 countries around the world. He has 14 boutiques in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and London, and he plans to open six more next year in places like Singapore, Jakarta and Beijing. He counts Oprah, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cameron Diaz, Katie Holmes and hundreds of other Hollywood stars among his loyal clientele.

Louboutin is just as solicitous of his less famous customers. At a recent personal appearance at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, he canceled his flight back to Paris in order to spend another two hours signing shoes. For a woman who confessed that she was “just a housewife,” Louboutin signed the sole, TO MY FAVORITE HOT HOUSEWIFE. A blushing bride asked him to sign her wedding shoes, and he grabbed a blue pen and wrote, HERE IS SOMETHING BLUE.

According to Saks’ fashion director’ Michael Fink, Louboutin’s shoes–which retail on average for $800–are one of the store’s top-selling brands. “It’s the mystique of the extremely sexy pump,” says Fink. “And, of course, the subtle branding of the red sole really helps.”

More than a cunning marketing concept, the red sole was a happy accident. While working on a prototype in his studio in his early designing days, Louboutin searched for a way to match the shoe to a colorful sketch. “Something was missing, and I couldn’t figure it out,” he remembers. “Then I realized that the black sole of the shoe was too dark.” So he grabbed a bottle of red nail polish from an assistant who was doing her nails nearby and painted the soles. “It didn’t take me long to learn from my customers that the red soles were very popular with men,” Louboutin says, laughing. “This red sole was a bit of a green light.”

While women have always been his predominant inspiration, Louboutin, a landscape and garden fanatic, often looks to nature for ideas. Starting out, he tried covering his shoes in fish scales. Another, more successful idea was embedding hydrangea petals in a clear silicone heel. He even tapped into the recycling trend with his “trash” shoes, which incorporated old métro tickets and café receipts in the heels. “He looks at everything,” says his close friend Diane von Furstenberg. “His shoes are like sculptures, objects, jewels.” But Louboutin knows that women’s most desired treasures are the ones they can wear.

Christian Louboutin poses with a pair of stilettos called
Christian Louboutin poses with a pair of stilettos called “Siamese” that he produced in collaboration with David Lynch.
Most designers learn their craft in the ateliers of more seasoned masters, but shoe designer Christian Louboutin found his calling as a 17-year-old apprentice in the dressing rooms of Paris’ famous cabaret the Folies Bergère. “I would watch the girls going up and down the stairs with these very heavy headdresses on, and they never looked at their shoes,” he says. “That’s where I learned that shoes are all about posture and proportion.”

Showgirls of all kinds–from Tina Turner to Nicole Kidman–are still an inspiration for Louboutin, 44, whose instantly recognizable red-soled stilettos have become de rigueur on the red carpet and among Hollywood’s A-list crowd. “He is the foremost shoe designer in the world,” says Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where his designs were the subject of a recent retrospective, “Sole Desire.”

Christian Louboutin spent the early years of his career designing shoes for some of fashion’s biggest names, including Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Maud Frizon. In 1992 he opened up his own shop at the end of a picturesque 19th century Parisian arcade. He still runs his business from that Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau address, but now his shoes are sold in 46 countries around the world. He has 14 boutiques in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and London, and he plans to open six more next year in places like Singapore, Jakarta and Beijing. He counts Oprah, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cameron Diaz, Katie Holmes and hundreds of other Hollywood stars among his loyal clientele.

Christian Louboutin is just as solicitous of his less famous customers. At a recent personal appearance at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, he canceled his flight back to Paris in order to spend another two hours signing shoes. For a woman who confessed that she was “just a housewife,” Christian Louboutin signed the sole, TO MY FAVORITE HOT HOUSEWIFE. A blushing bride asked him to sign her wedding shoes, and he grabbed a blue pen and wrote, HERE IS SOMETHING BLUE.

According to Saks’ fashion director’ Michael Fink, Christian Louboutin’s shoes–which retail on average for $800–are one of the store’s top-selling brands. “It’s the mystique of the extremely sexy pump,” says Fink. “And, of course, the subtle branding of the red sole really helps.”

More than a cunning marketing concept, the red sole was a happy accident. While working on a prototype in his studio in his early designing days, Christian Louboutin searched for a way to match the shoe to a colorful sketch. “Something was missing, and I couldn’t figure it out,” he remembers. “Then I realized that the black sole of the shoe was too dark.” So he grabbed a bottle of red nail polish from an assistant who was doing her nails nearby and painted the soles. “It didn’t take me long to learn from my customers that the red soles were very popular with men,” Louboutin says, laughing. “This red sole was a bit of a green light.”

While women have always been his predominant inspiration, Christian Louboutin, a landscape and garden fanatic, often looks to nature for ideas. Starting out, he tried covering his shoes in fish scales. Another, more successful idea was embedding hydrangea petals in a clear silicone heel. He even tapped into the recycling trend with his “trash” shoes, which incorporated old métro tickets and café receipts in the heels. “He looks at everything,” says his close friend Diane von Furstenberg. “His shoes are like sculptures, objects, jewels.” But Christian Louboutin knows that women’s most desired treasures are the ones they can wear.

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.’