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Louboutin studiously avoided school, with his mother's help. (She wrote sick notes for him that he would dictate.) At age 12, he moved out to live with an older boyfriend. "I was having lunch with my parents, and I was sleeping there sometimes," he recalls, as if this arrangement were perfectly ordinary. As a teen he danced at Le Palace, the iconic club where Mick Jagger, Loulou de la Falaise and Grace Jones mingled with club kids, whose clothes inspired Thierry Mugler and Yves Saint Laurent. Often young Christian would bring people home a guy, a girl, guys and girls in the wee hours of the morning. If his father, a cabinet maker, were away, his mother would insist they take her room.
Sometimes he and his friends would sneak into the Folies Bergére the cabaret where Josephine Baker perfected her danse banane and snag vacant seats during intermission. After leaving school, Louboutin interned at the Folies Bergére, gluing jewelry on costumes and fetching coffee for the performers. He spent much of his time dreaming up "super fantasy shoes" for the dancers. Some drawings of those ideas landed him a design gig with Charles Jourdan, who created shoes for Christian Dior; that in turn led to a job as an assistant and secretary to Roger Vivier, the "Fabergé of footwear," who invented the comma heel and the stiletto.
But Louboutin's love of cabaret never left him. Feu, his collaboration with the erotic-cabaret troupe Crazy Horse Paris, runs through May 31 and features original music by David Lynch and Swizz Beatz. "I always loved fish for the colors and birds for the plumage," he says. "In the same way, I loved those women of the cabaret. They were birds of paradise."
"Creative people often need time to crank it up or tease it out," says Louboutin's friend Bella Freud, the English fashion designer who recently created a line of fetish knitwear that incorporates four of his drawings. "With Christian, it is always at his disposal. He's not a tortured genius."
A grand illustration of Freud's point can be found throughout Louboutin's workspace, which spreads over several buildings on the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not far from the Louvre. In Louboutin's playful atelier, a tin man hangs from the ceiling. Shelves house a stuffed lemur, a pink motorcycle helmet and the limited-edition Cat Burglar Barbie, which Louboutin designed in 2009 on the condition he could shrink her ankles. (He deemed them too fat.) A bulletin board includes a calendar of priests, a drawing of Louboutin and Diane von Furstenberg on a mule, a photo of his friend Dina ("she's the biggest belly dancer in the world") and a 1950s-vintage picture of a gay Lebanese couple mimicking Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. "I love this picture," Louboutin says, covering the torso and face of a person on a postcard. "People have said these are the legs of Katharine Hepburn. But look" he removes his hand "it's Albert Einstein!"
For all his whimsy, Louboutin is vigorous about protecting his brand. His red sole is a genius marketing flourish, but it's also an easy target for counterfeiters selling knockoff Loubis. In 2010 he launched stopfakelouboutin.com, which features a video of a bulldozer plowing through a sea of fake shoes.
He has even called the fashion police on fellow designers. In April 2011, he filed a lawsuit against Yves Saint Laurent after the house produced shoes with red soles for its cruise collection. YSL argued that a designer cannot own a color; Louboutin cited Hermes' virtual ownership of orange and Tiffany's trademark of its duck-egg blue. "I would not use a green-and-red ribbon because I know those are the colors of Gucci," he says. "If you are supposedly creative, use your creativity to find a new path."
Louboutin's current path, alongside museum retrospectives and cabaret extravaganzas, includes the arrival of his second men's store, in New York City, this spring. His men's range, priced from $465 to $2,500, includes simple loafers and lace-ups as well as "trash" shoes decorated with discarded string, fabrics and notes from Louboutin's atelier. The No Limit Men's Flat, a $1,695 high-top sneaker, features dozens of golden spikes protruding from its vamp and crystals lining its red, brown and turquoise exterior.
Both his men's stores (the first opened in Paris last year) offer a tattoo service that lets customers imprint their own inkings on their shoes. He got the idea after hearing his friend Gareth Thomas, the openly gay English rugby player, discuss his love of his own tattoo. "They're pretty much a postcard of your life," Louboutin says. "People are proud of their tattoos. It's like a modern coat of arms."
And in Louboutin's eyes, his women's shoes are a modern badge of honor. He has little patience for those who complain that skyscraping heels slow women down, whether literally or metaphorically. "Why do people always want you to run?" he asks. "The issue is the same for everyone: you run, and at the end there is a grave. If you run all your life, you end up having seen nothing." As he walks out of the atelier for lunch at the Crazy Horse, his black studded flats make a gentle scuffle against the wooden floorboards.