Good Morning POU! This week is for the fashionistas and fashionisters! We’ll take a look at shoe designers, not celebs with their names on a line of shoes – but genuine, creative, wonderful designers. We’ve had a previous week on this topic, but this will be a whole new creative line-up.
I got the idea for this week because I recently saw a picture for the first time of Christian Louboutin and thought…”hey, that man is black.”
Christian Louboutin (born 7 January 1964) is a French fashion designer whose high-end stiletto footwear incorporates shiny, red-lacquered soles that have become his signature. Initially a freelance designer for fashion houses, he started his own shoe salon in Paris, with his shoes finding favor with celebrity clientele. He has partnered with other organizations for creative projects including limited edition pieces, gallery exhibits, and even a custom bar. His company has since branched out into men’s footwear, handbags, fragrances and makeup.
Louboutin was born and raised in Paris’s 12th arrondissement. He was the only son of Roger, a cabinet maker, and Irene, a homemaker, both French, from Brittany. He has three sisters. Louboutin said in a 2012 interview that he was “much darker-skinned than everyone else in his family. You know, I felt I wasn’t French. My family was very French and so I decided they had probably adopted me. But instead of feeling it was terrible and that I was an outsider who had to go and find my real family, I invented my own history, full of characters from Egypt because I was very into the pharaohs.” He incidentally discovered, following a revelation by one of his sisters in 2014 that his biological father was in fact an Egyptian, with whom his mother Irene had been having a secret affair.
Louboutin began sketching shoes in his early teens, ignoring his academic studies. His first job was at the Folies Bergères, the cabaret where he assisted the entertainers backstage. He was also a fixture on the city’s party scene, clubbing his nights away alongside Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol.
His little formal training included drawing and the decorative arts at the Académie d’Art Roederer. Louboutin claims his fascination with shoes began in 1976, when he visited the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie on the avenue Daumesnil. It was there that he saw a sign from Africa forbidding women wearing sharp stilettos from entering a building for fear of damage to the extensive wood flooring. This image stayed in his mind, and he later used this idea in his designs. “I wanted to defy that,” Louboutin said. “I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.”
Fascinated by world cultures, he ran away in his teens to Egypt and spent a year in India. Louboutin returned to Paris in 1981, where he assembled a portfolio of drawings of elaborate high heels. He brought it to the top couture houses. The effort resulted in employment with Charles Jourdan. Subsequently, Louboutin met Roger Vivier, who claims to have invented the stiletto, or spiked-heel shoe. Louboutin became an apprentice in Vivier’s atelier.
Going on to serve as a freelance designer, Louboutin designed women’s shoes for Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Maud Frizon. In the late 1980s, he turned away from fashion to become a landscape gardener and to contribute to Vogue but missed working with shoes and set up his company in 1991.
With funds from two backers, he opened a Paris shoe salon in 1991 with Princess Caroline of Monaco as his first customer. She complimented the store one day when a fashion journalist was present, and the journalist’s subsequent publication of Princess’ comments helped greatly to increase Louboutin’s renown.
Louboutin has topped the Luxury Institute‘s annual Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) for three years; the brand’s offerings were declared the Most Prestigious Women’s Shoes in 2007, 2008, and 2009. By 2011, Louboutin became the most searched-for shoe brand online.
In the spring of 2012, the company opened its first men’s store in New York City, with over 93 square metres (1,000 square feet) of space and located next to its existing Horatio Street store. From previous experience in his Paris store, Louboutin claimed that women feel uncomfortable when men stare at them while they try on shoes, hence the separate stores.
The first Louboutin Men’s Boutique, Christian Louboutin Boutique Homme on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris, opened in the summer of 2012.