Christian Louboutin is a French luxury footwear and fashion designer whose footwear has incorporated shiny, red-lacquered soles that have become his signature. So you can easily recognize a pair of louboutin shoes from the red sole.
Louboutin started his studies of drawing at the decorative arts at the Académie d’Art Roederer. He began to sketch shoes in his early teens.
Louboutin claims his fascination with shoes began in 1976, when he visited the “Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie” where 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.”
Louboutin was an apprentice in Roger Vivier’s atelier.
He then launched his own brand after having worked as a free-lance for big luxury brands like Chanel. Princess Caroline de Monaco was his first client.
The designer’s professed goal has been to “make a woman look sexy, beautiful, to make her legs look as long” as he can. While he does offer some lower-heeled styles, Louboutin is generally associated with his dressier evening-wear designs incorporating jeweled straps, bows, feathers, patent leather, red soles, and other similar decorative touches.
