Nothing But Shoes

Even those who haven’t heard of Christian Louboutin have seen his shoes.

They’re marked by his trademark red sole, the result of a lucky experiment with a Mary Jane and a bottle of nail polish many years ago.

Now he’s the world-renowned designer of haute heels favored by the rich and famous. Cate Blanchett, a die-hard fan, donned a pair of Louboutin’s 4-inch silver stilettos for this year’s Oscars, despite being pregnant. Oprah so adores her Louboutins that she wore a flawlessly unscuffed pair during a recent interview with “freegans,” people who refuse to pay for anything, let alone an $800 pair of heels.

“Owning his shoes is just a wonderful wink for a woman,” says Louboutin’s friend and frequent collaborator, designer Diane von Furstenberg. “It’s just a very fun thing for a woman to do.”

On Monday, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology opens “Sole Desire,” an exhibition of the designer’s work with pairs of shoes culled from the school’s collection and from Louboutin’s own archive.

But just because he has become, literally, a museum piece, don’t think that Louboutin’s characteristic mix of sex, style and humor is about to be shelved.

“In designing shoes for myself,” he says on the phone from Paris, “I’m not thinking of a specific person or catwalk. I’m just not thinking of clothes at all. I’m always thinking of a naked woman, actually.”

Naked women, as it happens, were one of the designer’s first inspirations. In interviews, he’s described his formative years with a mixture of vice and high society that could be Dickensian if it wasn’t so utterly French.

Born in 1963, he was barely tall enough to see over the bar counter when he began roaming the storied nightlife of 1970s Paris and ogling the dancers in cabarets. “His passion for dancing and showgirls increasingly disrupted his schoolwork,” reads one passage from his online bio.

He freelanced for design houses as famous as Chanel and Yves Saint-Laurent before netting a gig with footwear specialist Roger Vivier in 1988. Vivier was some 40 years his senior, and working with the master taught Louboutin, as Louboutin would later say, that “shoe design was a real métier” — in other words, his dream job.

His fascination with the stiletto ­started early. Fashion legend dictates that as a teenager, Louboutin was strolling through Paris when he noticed a sign prohibiting high heels in the Museum of Oceanic Art, lest they scratch the floors.

In 1992, he opened his first boutique in Paris and filled it with heels so dangerously pointy they verged on scandalous.

Source NY Daily News