From the Vaults: Christian Louboutin, 'Shoes Are Like a Weapon'

The legions of well-heeled ladies who are 31-year-old Paris-based shoe designer Christian Louboutin's diehard collectors scour his boutiques on New York's Madison Avenue and Paris' Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau hunting for much more than your average foot warmer. "Chaussures are like a jewel," Louboutin declares while puffing on a cigarette. "It's the idea of pure luxury. If you offer a woman a beautiful rin, the magical moment is when she opens the box. Voila! I have to show my shoes in the same way."

Crafting them from exquisite fabrics like linen, satin, crepe, patent leather, and chiffon, Louboutin spends days revamping each millimeter of a shoe until it shrieks perfection. "The nicest shoes occur when you add things or get rid of things from other designs," he says.

At age 16, Louboutin rand Paris music halls offering to design shoes for their performers and eventually wound up gearing the heels of some cabaret hoofers. "When you see a woman onstage you can immediately see what she should have on her feet. Showgirls are the best to design for because shoes are like a weapon for them. They have to go up and down and run all over the stage kicking their legs in the air, and they are really naked except for a lot of feathers, headpieces, and of course, shoes," he says. The theatrical training paid off: Miss Ultimate Show Goddess, Madonna, is now a huge fan. "She has an incredible eye. She looks at shoes like a tool for her work." That Material Girl is not alone. Louboutin's designs are stepping out on the fashion forward feet of Cher, Catherine Deneuve, Caroline of Monaco, and Diane von Furstenberg.

His fall '95 collection encompasses a melange of inspiration. There is a surreal, ultra-high-heeled number in "very hairy" pony fur with a faux red nail at the toe "like a manicure," and ones with petite photographs of Renaissance beautifully tucked at the buckle. Looking to nature, Louboutin conjured up a heel after spotting "a branch floating in the sea at Cadaques, Spain, that was completely curved and white, almost sandblasted." With such natural inspirations, it's also no shock that his next project is a line of terra cotta garden furniture, to be unleashed in 1996 in America. But shoe-aholic dandies beware: Louboutin will never design for men. "That is completely another job altogether," he sighs. "I have always had a feminine way of drawing. If you put that into a man's shoe it would really become way too much."

This article originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of OUT.