Of red soles and green stripes

Christian Louboutin

By Christian Louboutin and Eric Reinhardt

Rizzoli New York, 350 pages

Available at National Book Store

Rizzoli New York has to be the Criterion Collection of coffee-table books. Every year this prestigious publisher issues beautifully bound volumes on fashion, photography and art that combine — well, fashion, photography and art — in the most stunning, collectible manner possible.

One standout is Christian Louboutin, with its plush gatefold cover that opens up to reveal a pop-up of a woman’s stiletto-shod legs sprouting from a red flower.

Shoe genius: Images of Louboutin’s imaginative artistry form the bulk of the book.

John Malkovich is the unlikely contributor of the foreword; this man of many surprising talents also contributes a pencil sketch of Louboutin in a suit. The actor discovered the shoe designer at an awards show in Paris: “The one thing I do remember from that night was the sight of an attractive French woman in her early 30s walking by in a most extraordinary pair of shoes,” Malkovich writes. “They were black suede, with red lettering in Chinese script, ankle length, with a stiletto heel. I asked her who had designed them, and she said they were made by a young, French shoemaker called Christian Louboutin.”

This spurred Malkovich to check out Louboutin’s store on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris, a curious pastime he continues to this day. “I’ve always loved to … take the time to view Christian’s collections piece by piece, looking at the overall concept, the styles, the materials, the forms, and, of course, the effect. His wit and style and passion and inventiveness mark him as one of the leading designers of our time.”

Once you’ve gotten over the shock of Malkovich being a Louboutin fan, the book commences with 28-page interview of Louboutin by writer Eric Reinhardt, profiling the designer from childhood — when he started designing shoes at 12 — to current red-sole fame.

The second part of the book is all about his shoes. Each page is devoted to a stylized photo of a highlighted pair, and Louboutin continues his conversation with Reinhardt about his inspirations and design process. The shoemaker credits his Pansies series for his trademark red soles. He’d made all his shoe sketches in color — “In most cases, there’s a significant loss between the drawing and the final realization,” Louboutin says. “Because of technical limitations, the heels are never quite fine enough, or the lines never arched enough. But for the Pansies, when the first shoe came off the line, a model in pink crepe, I saw that it couldn’t have come any closer to the original drawing. And yet something wasn’t right. It took me a while to figure it out. It was because the sole was black. I grabbed my assistant Sarah’s nail polish and painted the soles red. Thanks to the color, which acted as a revelation, the original concept completely reemerged.”

The shoe that sparked all the Louboutin worship, though, was the Pigalle. A black pump in shiny patent leather with a pointed toe, five-inch stiletto and those traffic-stopping soles, they became the ultimate seduction tool, attracting women to Louboutin, and men to women.

“Indeed, no one ever thinks about the soles of shoes, even though they’re very important,” Louboutin says. “When you turn around to watch a woman walking away, what do you see? An outline, a gait, and the soles, which have become like two red signals. Several of my clients have told me that they’d never had so many pickup offers as they’d had since they started wearing shoes with red soles.”

Mixed in with the footwear photos are portraits of iconic women like Kristin Scott Thomas, Diane Von Furstenberg, and Dita Von Teese.

Part Three is on Fetish, shoes Louboutin made not for walking in but to titillate and provoke. And who better to photograph such a subject matter than David Lynch, whom Louboutin met while doing a magazine article on gardens, of all things. Lynch asked Louboutin not to hire skinny models but full-figured nudes and Louboutin happily complied (saying that too-thin women would evoke masochism more than fetishism). The resulting erotic pictorial explores the strong link between shoes and sexual desire.

Like a palate cleanser, the end of the book goes back to Louboutin’s essentially happy and whimsical outlook. One chapter is about places that are dear to the designer, like his stores, workspace and inspirations, followed by a laminated catalog of all his designs since 1986: “Darn, there are so many missing!” laments the designer.

More fun than any other coffee-table book I’ve ever come across, Christian Louboutin is not just for fashion editors or shoe designers aspiring to be the next Louboutin but for anyone who loves buying and wearing shoes, which, face it — if you’re human and have feet — is just about all of us.