![]() A shoe can be an icebreaker, or an inkblot. (The offices of fashion magazines often smell like locker rooms, owing to the rows of stale sneakers and ballerina flats that lurk beneath the desks of carless career women.) To Louboutin, shoes are less interesting for their physical properties than for their psychological ones. But, somewhere between the Chalcolithic age and the Kardashians, shoes went from abetting to embellishing, and even impeding, the feet as a way of getting from one place to another. In 2008, in a cave in Armenia, scientists discovered what is thought to be the world’s oldest leather shoe, a fifty-five-hundred-year-old cowhide moccasin-a woman’s size 7-with laces and straw padding. (Instead of working under armed protection, as the client wanted him to, Louboutin paved the soles in zircons and shipped them to Hong Kong, where the decoys were replaced with real gems.) For a private client, a mine owner, he made a pair of shoes with ruby soles. He has designed pairs of shoes with heels of mismatched heights. In homage to the Surrealists, Louboutin once created a pair of pumps with a hydrodynamic shape, a bulging eye above the pinkie toe, and tessellating rows of black and gold scales-the foot as a fish. People have a strong relationship to their body, and it was quite moving, I thought, that this person, who is paralyzed, still cares about what’s correct for her feet.” ![]() “I thought, If I were in a wheelchair, I’d like to be in super-high heels,” Louboutin said. The scene, Louboutin said, was “something out of Buñuel.” A similar thing had happened once before, when a disabled woman showed up at a signing session-Louboutin autographs shoes, as an author does books-and presented him with a pump of medium height. Her passenger had a blanket over her lap and, on her feet, a pair of golden shoes that, glinting in the sunlight, looked as though they were encrusted with coins. Two women came around a corner, unwitting participants in a street-corner défilé. Somewhere in the Second Arrondissement, a traffic light turned red. Louboutin opened up the throttle on Rue de Rivoli. We accelerated tipsily and zoomed off into Paris traffic, dodging bollards and side mirrors. ![]() He pushed the visor up and mounted the machine. The bike, a navy-blue model, was parked by the curb. He had just had lunch at a brasserie near his office. One afternoon in early March, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin decided to go for a ride on his Vespa. “A shoe has so much more to offer than just to walk,” he says. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |