Louboutin’s clients nourish his imagination too. “I totally understand Valentino,” he says. “He loves his clients—they are his whole life. My clients have talent. It’s in spending time and talking with them that I decide to design certain things.”
The appreciation Louboutin feels for his femmes is mutual, says brewery heiress Daphne Guinness, who calls him one of her dearest friends. “He can make anyone’s leg look sexy,” she claims. “He’s an artist.”
And like many artists, Louboutin says that inspiration strikes him in odd ways. “I bought a children’s chair the other day,” he says. “It’s wound with rope and has a sort of sailor’s feel to it. I’m using it as the basis for a shoe. A great doorknob can become the idea for a shoe.”
Though his primary focus has always been to construct shoes that “flatter the leg,” Louboutin has become more of a purist recently, ditching the wilder ornamentation of his earlier days in favor of focusing on a shoe’s architecture. “I did my share of feathers and spangles,” he says with a smile. “My nightmare would be for a guy whose girlfriend is wearing my shoes to say that he’s not going out with her in shoes like that.”
a shoe takes shape.
Not that Louboutin thinks men understand everything about women and their attachment to shoes. “I’m always astonished by how much men misunderstand women,“ he laments. “For one, men don’t understand how a woman can own 300 pairs of shoes. For a woman, it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
