8 Reasons Why You Can’t Miss Christian Louboutin’s New Paris Exhibition

“I always liked to travel,” said Christian Louboutin, on a hot summer’s day last July. The designer has almost too many houses to count, all over the world, but he was referring to the travels he made in his mind’s eye, as a child. “My imaginary travels all came from that museum. I wanted to see other civilisations, I had fantasies about a different way of being. I have known the museum since I was a child, and am very attached to it for multiple reasons.”

“That museum” is the Palais de la Porte Dorée, in Paris, where a major retrospective of his work has just opened. Titled Christian Louboutin: L’Exhibition(iste), and brought together with the help of Olivier Gabet, the head curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD) it’s a sprawling, fun-filled tour through both Louboutin’s archive and his obsessions.

His intention? To make his red-soled brand of glamour available to all and sundry. “If you work in fashion, you have the feeling that everybody knows everything, but fashion really is a niche. It’s about giving people access to things which are exciting. I hope it is dedicated to people who love shoes but who are not necessarily clients, but who like to see beautiful things, to see how they are made. It’s to give a view into a dream world.” Following the emotional opening, where guests were serenaded by a live orchestra, Louboutin took British Vogue inside the must-see exhibition. Here’s everything you need to know. 

The museum was the first place in which Louboutin was exposed to a high heel 

As a young boy, Louboutin was a frequent visitor to the Palais, having been born two blocks away. He also attended two schools – the Elisa Lemonnier and Paul Valéry lycées – behind the Palais. “At the back of the building is a school that used to be my school when I was 13, 14. I got expelled from there, but my windows were facing on to this building,” he said. “Before that, my parents used to send me every weekend.” The Palais was, in fact, the location where he was first exposed to high heels. “The floor was so precious that you couldn’t walk on it with high heels, so there was a sketch from the ’50s showing a shoe with a red cross through it. As a kid in the ’70s, I was looking at it, thinking, ‘This is a nice shoe.’ It was the first sketch I had seen.”

It’s also responsible for his love of objects, and his methods of absorbing them

“The building had so many amazing collections, of all the ex-French colonies, from Africa, South America, so my eyes were really flirtatious to all the objects and all the weird and wonderful things,” said Louboutin. “If I like objects so much, it’s really because of this building. I owe it to this museum to look at objects in a free way.” 

The show is a celebration of craftsmanship – and not just in relation to shoes 

A series of fun films with a miniature Christian carrying scissors and tapping in nails to a giant shoe help to inject the process of shoemaking with some of the designer’s characteristic wit. But the exhibition also seeks to elevate craftsmanship on a more general level, with a series of specially commissioned works. “We wanted the exhibition to be a succession of surprises,” said Louboutin. In one room, a collection of stained-glass window panels created by the Maison du Vitrail light up the walls around vitrines containing early shoes and childhood photographs; in a second, a Sevillian silver palanquin made by L’Orfebreria Villarreal takes centre-stage, decorated with hundreds of candles; and in a third is a Bhutanese theatre, the woodwork sculpted in Bhutan and delivered to Paris by boat, in a shipping process that took over three months.

There are numerous archival surprises – including the Maquereau shoe inspired by a fish in the museum’s aquarium 

Louboutin’s very first creation, the Maquereau shoe, made in 1987, was inspired by the iridescence of the fish in the aquarium at the Palais de la Porte Dorée. “I have a fish allergy, I cannot eat them – but I love fish,” Louboutin said. “They are so inspirational, I have always been fascinated by them and loved to watch them in the aquarium when I was young.” Made of metallic leather, the tail of a herring forms the heel of the shoe, and the scales of the mackerel close over the toe. Louboutin photographed the shoe himself in 1988 in front of the tropical aquarium in the museum – side-stepping official permissions and authorisations.

All those Nineties shoe hits just keep on coming 

There are numerous other shoe gems in this collection, from the wedding shoes Louboutin made for his friend Marie de Beistegui – “all her family came and they were all in tears” – to Princess Caroline of Monaco’s ’90s favourites, the Andy-Warhol inspired Mary-Janes with a graphic Pop Art flower as a fastening. “She came in to my store by accident,” Louboutin recalled speaking of the Princess, “and she bought shoes for the Bal de la Rose [in 1995]. She was completely wrong – it was not a rose, it’s a pansy. There are only three petals. But I was inspired by Warhol, he filtered through my memory.”

The inspiration and the interpretation doesn’t always align 

The Molinier room, decked out like an English granny’s chintz-heavy living room – with plates on the wall and Mr Kipling cakes on the coffee table – is filled with some of Louboutin’s most provocative shoes. And close-up, those chintzy sofa patterns are composed of combinations of the body, inspired by the work of the photographer Pierre Molinier, who used to transform himself into an eroticised woman. It’s all in the service of Louboutin’s point that often people choose to misunderstand his work. “One has to interpret things, but it speaks about yourself more than it speaks about the creator,” he said. “Sometimes people are really thinking of a very specific thing which is pretty far from who you are. As a designer, you are provoking emotion, feelings – you are suggesting things. I am not disappointed if people don’t get [what] the original inspiration is. It is amusing.” A case in point? The spike-smothered, six-inch heels on display, which numerous observers interpret as erotic, S&M-style shoes, but which were originally inspired by 17th-century suits of armour.

There are some truly glorious celebrity moments 

Name a celebrity and it’s unlikely they haven’t at one time donned a pair of Louboutin’s famous red-soled shoes. From Dolly Parton to Sex And The City’s Carrie Bradshaw to Aretha Franklin, who was buried in a gold-plated coffin and 5-inch, cherry red, patent Louboutins, the museum’s hall of fame is here to remind you of the highlights. 

 
The final room contains objects which continue to inspire from Louboutin’s own collections

“The second part of the exhibition should be like a stroll… through objects that I have been loving for a long time,” said Louboutin. In this room are sculptures by Janine Janet, a bench by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, kachina dolls, Hopi masks and a Gandhara bust from Louboutin’s own collection. “I am not putting my shoes next to them, but you may see a connection. It’s like when a woman once tried on a shoe and clapped her hands. The shoe was inspired by the flamenco. She didn’t know that, but something made her clap.” 

A 17th-century painting of Le Duc de Beauvau, for instance, comes from his home in Lisbon, and illustrates the principle behind his “nude” shoe collection, which was ground-breaking when it was released in 2013, recording as it did five, leg-lengthening shades of “nudes” for different skin tones rather than just Caucasian skin types. “What I love about this painting is the legs,” Louboutin said, when I visited his Lisbon home in December 2018. “The legs look even better – because [of] the way his stockings and his shoes are white. I am always saying that the idea of having your nude on your shoe gives you better legs. It’s funny because it’s a very classical painting but there is something quite disturbing. Those long legs! And that very, very short armoury! It’s a beautiful painting.”