You go into a dark exhibition space where you’re faced with a high wall of dull red shoe lasts, each dangling from string like offal in some surreal butcher’s shop display. Round the corner you find your way into a fairground cum cabaret. Louboutin’s shoes – lots of them – are displayed singly on merry-go-round chairs, in a privet arbour favoured by stately homes, and on a turntable lit with dressing-room bulbs where mirrored surfaces show each shoe from every possible angle. Beyond, people are sitting in the pointed ‘toe’ of a giant, signature Louboutin red-soled shoe, apparently watching a cabaret dancer in black lace basque and suspenders, with an exaggeratedly hourglass figure. She’s magically there and not there and as the dance sequence finishes she morphs into a be-jewelled high heeled shoe, a sophisticated hologram effect. What you learn is that Louboutin’s shoes are not just about creating a particular kind of feminine look; they are using that look, and the body associated with it, as a kind of ‘last’. The shoes mimic the lines of the hourglass body: the low ‘décolleté’ cutaway at the front creates a second cleavage that is erotic or disturbing, depending on the viewer’s perspective; and as the shoe curves outwards around the wearer’s heel and inwards for the shoe’s heel, that hourglass shape is repeated. Quotes from Louboutin himself confirm this: it’s not the fabric or colour of the shoe that matters most. It’s the silhouette or line. When we go shoe shopping with women taking part in the If the Shoe Fits project, the precise curve of a heel can be a deal breaker.

I went expecting some sort of exotic elegance and initially found the full-on diversity and extravagance of the shoes almost vulgar, trashy even, but not in a good way. Again, a quote from Louboutin asserts that he has no time whatsoever for minimalism. By the time I left the exhibition – and the white leather jeans that ‘grew’ into white leather boots, the Guinness cans wrapped around the heels of a pair of black patent shoes, the fish skin-covered shoes (in mackerel or salmon), the mules decorated with the garbage from a seamstress’s floor, the Rolls Royce engine-fronted shoes, the Marie Antoinette shoes (complete with anachronistic galleon) – I was won over by an exuberance and playfulness I hadn’t anticipated. And this wealth of materials, �

London Design MuseumMarch – July 2012

Prof Jenny HockeyPrinciple Investigator

‘If the Shoe Fits: Footwear, Identity & Transition’July 2012Department of Sociological Studies, The University of Sheffieldwww.sheffield.ac.uk/iftheshoefits/

Louboutin Retrospective

decorations and references was reflected in the range of footwear. Dizzy-making stilettos were not the only item of footwear, though they were sufficiently in evidence to make my feet ache. But there were low-heeled pumps and mules, espadrilles, relatively simple gladiator sandals, flat-heeled boots and men’s jewelled trainers plus more sober brogues. And Louboutin, the text in his mock-up studio said, draws and draws for days on end, designing hundreds of prototypes for each of his two seasonal collections, each range then edited down to about 150 shoes. Creating height was, however, always something he aspired to, with its association with flight; the trapeze that hangs in his studio is there not as a prop but something he practices. And along with height, transparency was a theme with boots and shoes that enclosed the foot in fishnet and lace, or framed it in a couple of spaghetti straps and a toe post.

The immobilising fetish shoes produced through a collaboration between Louboutin and film maker David Lynch were concealed in a black curtained cubicle. Notices outside in the Design Museum warned the visitor to view them at their own risk, a strangely coy or perhaps deliberately titillating introduction to photos of

2

women wearing only these shoes, but ones that had already appeared publicly in a mainstream Sunday colour supplement. It was striking that the fetish shoes which quite literally could not be walked in were the only ones represented on the body or the foot. Even the hologram dancer simply turned into a shoe. We couldn’t see what she had on her feet. This exhibition profiles beautiful, inventive, witty shoes. For sure, they are bought by collectors, simply as valuable, eye-catching objects. But they are worn too and it would have added another whole dimension to see film or even still images of people wearing them. Louboutin is quoted as saying that the front of the shoe is about the look and the back is about the walk or gait. This exhibition was wonderful, theatrical fun. I was sad to leave it for a greyer world outside – but I would so loved to have been given the back view.

Photographs by Luke HayesCourtesy of the Design Museumwww.designmuseum.org