SOLE MAN

With their trademark scarlet soles and glamorous buyers, Christian Louboutin’s eponymous footwear are shoo-ins to the pantheon of modern fashion greats

- JAN JANSSEN AND RICK MULLER

The history of fashion is replete with famous designers: Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Giorgio Armani, Versace, Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld et al. But when it comes to shoes, one man stands above the rest — Christian Louboutin. One of the most-revered and successful shoe designers of the modern era, Louboutin has created a brand whose signature red soles have lent him an aura that not even Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik can match.

Propelled by Carrie Bradshaw’s fanatical devotion to Louboutin on Sex and the City, not to mention that of Princess Diana, he has become a household name among fashion-conscious women, particularly celebrities who can afford the expensive price tag that comes with his quintessential footwear. His designer credo is to “make a woman look sexy, beautiful, [and] make her legs look as long as I can.”

Not only did Louboutin spearhead the drive to bring high heels back into fashion in the 1990s, but he has also elevated shoe design into an art form. His impact on the cultural landscape has been so profound, his work was the subject of a landmark museum retrospective in Paris earlier this year. Slyly entitled Christian Louboutin: L’Exhibition[nist], the show opened on February 25 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, where 500 of Louboutin’s original creations were on display, until France and the rest of Europe were locked down due to the novel coronavirus. But the palais has recently reopened, and the Louboutin retrospective is further confirmation of the 57-year-old French designer’s visionary esthetic and undeniable influence on the evolution of fashionable footwear.