Fashion

MK: For me it is exactly the body of a showgirl. It is completely bare...this is almost one person with a parade back. Don't you see the showgirl?

Most of us don't see it. But it's the genius of christian Louboutin. He can translate a showgirl into a shoe. His inspiration comes from the most unlikely sources, fish scales, massai beads, spider webs. Louboutin has transformed footwear into fantasy and his wearers into wonder woman who walk tall .

CL : I was always fascinated as a child by dancers, performance artists like showgirls......I worked at the Folies Bergere when I was 17...I learnt a lot of things by just looking at the girls...one very important exercise is when they went up and down the stairs ..which in real life has a certain height, a certain depth.

In real life you look at your feet when you are going down stairs. Showgirls are smiling and walk straight- no head down. The shoes are so important because it can give you a different posture. It has to be comfortable...it has to have this perfect shape and elongate the legs to the maximum

MK: The showgirls put fresh meat in their shoes to protect the balls of their feet which inspired Louboutin to make cushioned insoles. His heels went as high as was humanly possible.

CL: For me no heel has been high enough. 
When I started in '92 to design high heels and when I look at them now, they really seem mini heels and I remember a woman saying, they were super high! How can you walk on them? And it was something like 9 cm. Now I double it. So you know the limits haven't been reached yet.

For making a dress you need a sewing machine and thread. But there is no way we can do it like that. Just look in the atelier here. You have to have some specific machines, you have to have wood lasts...even the heel is an engineering piece in itself. This little thing that supports the human weight has to have a precise balance etc.


MK: This Parisian atelier completes five pairs each day. Laboutin has created over twenty thousand styles in his twenty years of career, but he claims never to be running short of ideas.

CL: If you open your eyes, inspiration is everywhere. In every detail of architecture, in every conversation, in every aspect of life.

One of my inspirations is definitely coming from travelling and seeing different things, different cultures, different colours, different elements, different everything. 

I went to Brasilia in Brasil, the universe of forms and shapes. It is one of the richest cities I have ever been to. It was fascinating, some buildings are like buckles.

Definitely Niemeyer is also a huge source of inspiration...Niemeyer's columns are very thin from the bottom and then they become larger and then they go thin again....So if you just take the angle it could be the behind of a heel but if you take the whole support of the column it could be a T-strap.

I am always designing the summer collection in hot places. It is easier to design sandals with high temperatures!

I may draw something which is a souvenir of a trip, but it is not necessarily linked. For example when I am going to Egypt, not everything has to be Egyptian. Why should women wear Egyptian shoes, because I have been to Egypt. So I keep the impressions in my head and they will come out someday.