Christian Louboutin: the fun and fetishism With studs, spikes, scarlet soles and toe cleavage, Christian Louboutin has been playing footsie with shoe design for 20 years. Coming from a man who insists he is not interested in the dark side, Christian Louboutin's shoes take even the casual observer on a subversive journey. There are shoes with spikes, shoes with ribbons that appear to have been sewn on to the wearer's flesh, shoes with laces that bind the leg in something reminiscent of barbed wire - and lots and lots of studs. As for the curves, arches and pointy toes of his swooping sketches - they could be a map of the sexual act. IN PICTURES: Christian Louboutin's 20th anniversary capsule collection 'Hmm,' their creator says, tilting his chair and almost taking out the cardboard mask of Prince William pinned to the cork board behind his desk in the process. 'I'm not a sex obsessive, that's for sure. I'm not crazy about the tarty look. But don't forget that Freud had a mould of a foot with an arch in his office. A foot was quite important for Freud. Pensée mary janes with their flower closures, from autumn/winter 2012. Several hours in Louboutin's entertaining company confirm that despite the fetishism exhibition on which he collaborated with David Lynch four years ago, darkness really isn't his thing. The very first shoe he designed under his own name was conceived to amuse. It was 1992 and I was looking at this picture of Princess Diana taken while her husband was giving a speech. She looked so sad and bored, I thought, what would bring a smile to her face? The logical answer, for Louboutin at least, was the Love Shoe, a flat pump with contrasting trim which, when viewed from above, spelt the word love across the vamp of both shoes. As far as Louboutin knows, the princess never acquired a pair, but thousands of other women did. Later she gave him another idea - cleavage shoes. People had a really hard time with toe décolleté back then. Especially the French. My God, you couldn't even sell French women a sandal because they didn't have pedicures and their feet were terrible.' Undaunted by the national scandal of scuzzy female feet, Louboutin snipped his leather ever lower. It was Diana dancing with John Travolta who inspired me. She was wearing these really bad English shoes and they showed half her toes. It looked tacky but so good somehow. She had that naughtiness and it was appearing subconsciously. In his first year of business, he sold 200 pairs of Love Shoes, despite his little shop being at the entrance of a Parisian shopping arcade so dusty and unvisited that Louboutin would trot its length several times a day to make it seem busier. Today we're both trotting as he leads me on a tour of his expanded empire, which now occupies numbers 12, 14, 19, 21, 23 and 27 of rue Jean Jacques Rousseau (named after the curmudgeonly Swiss philosopher who took a dim view of luxury and vanity). A sketch for the re-issued Bow Bow shoe; right: The satin silk ruffles of of Escandria, autumn/winter 2010. Louboutin's orange trainers, which naturally are his own design and clash stirringly with his red Anderson & Sheppard suit, slap daintily along pavements and across wonky wooden floors. There, in the showroom, hovering above a group of rapt retailers who are being talked through next season's collection, is the trapeze swing from which, time permitting, he still occasionally dangles (he took up trapeze after seeing the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire). Here, in the workroom, surrounded by bespoke wooden lasts with the names of Kristin Scott Thomas or Janet Jackson felt-tipped on to them, are a handful of white-coated artisans hammering, cutting and moulding prototypes and one-offs. One floor above the entrance, with its twinkling chandelier shaped like a ship from the Armada, is his garret office, the one with the Prince William mask which Louboutin wore to the leaving party of one of his English employees. Across the courtyard, in the tiny reception, are copies of the Louboutin Times , his in-house newspaper, the most recent edition of which carries a front-page story about Mrs Tependris, a fictional Louboutin junkie who claims she is 'ruined (well just in Greece)!!!!! My houses, my planes, my boats are filled with Louboutins... I have no more space for my Titians, my Warhols, my Caravaggios, my dogs, my trainers!!!! It's a spoof, of course, penned by Louboutin and his friend Natasha Fraser, the daughter of Lady Antonia, but there are plenty of real-life Mrs Tependrises. Louboutin Mania has become the trophy addiction of our times. Everyone from Daphne Guinness and Arielle Dombasle (respectively the mistress and estranged wife of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy) to Sarah Jessica Parker, Oprah and Michelle Obama has a shrine in her wardrobe to him. The author Danielle Steel apparently owns 6,000 pairs, but far more modest salaries have been splurged, several previously worn pairs at a time, on eBay. One New Yorker told her inquisitive husband that the Christian Louboutin who kept appearing in their bank details was her gynaecologist. Other women repeatedly buy classics such as the Very Privé, his bestselling peep-toe with the concealed platform, rather than newer designs, so they can tell their husbands it is the same shoe they have had for years. Left: feathered pluminette from spring/summer 1995; right: Engin spike, spring/summer 2010 . Louboutin is immensely grateful to these obsessives, but also empathetic because even though, as he wistfully points out, 'men don't have the same relationship as women with their shoes', he has managed to fill the emotional void by collecting prodigious quantities of everything else, from the soaring carved North African doors in his showroom to the neon-framed Indian film posters (he has 149) in the basement. His four houses, scattered across France, Portugal and Egypt, and his 13th-century castle in the Vendée, are crammed with curios, including a stuffed cougar called Demi, which resides in his Paris apartment. The Old-Curiosity-Shop-meets-Devil-Wears-Louboutin vibe of his HQ should not deceive. This is a formidable business, still owned wholly by Louboutin and his two original partners, Henri Seydoux and Bruno Chambelland. Last year Louboutin sold 700,000 pairs of shoes, at between £350 and £1,000 each. 'That's 3,000 a day,' he says. That shocked me. Very little else disturbs his sense of propriety, not even the policeman who telephoned because Louboutin's card had been found in the handbag of a prostitute who had stabbed a man. Au contraire, the incident prompted him to design a shoe called Murderess, its heel so thin it could be used to pick a lock - or pierce a heart. It is very, very sexy. Louboutin has been turning darkness into larkiness since he was a child. The youngest, by a long way, of four siblings, his 'communist' wood carver father and his housewife mother had a liberal approach to child rearing that might raise eyebrows today. Their lattitude encouraged him to create a parallel reality. He became aware that the family was hard-up only when a classmate turned up at the family's home offering his mother a job as a maid. 'It wasn't so bad,' Louboutin recalls, before adding that some days he would walk home from school to the 12th arrondissement where he lived and find burning rats running down the street - 'The other kids had set them on fire.' He played truant constantly while his mother obligingly wrote notes to the teachers covering for him. Then, at 12, with the blessing of his parents, he moved out. It is sometimes tricky pinning Louboutin down, but what seems to have happened is that, in the street, he met a man, a photographer, 10 years his senior. The two struck up conversation... and Louboutin went to live with him. 'It didn't seem that remarkable,' says Louboutin, who points out that his best friend Eva Ionesco left home at 11. Ionesco was the daughter of the photographer Irina Ionesco, whose erotic pictures were fashionable at the time, and has the dubious honour of being the youngest model ever to feature in a nude pictorial in Playboy . Aged five, Eva became her mother's favourite muse - to the fascinated opprobrium of the art world. When Eva left home it was to move in with Louboutin's parents, who subsequently brought her up. She later sued her mother for emotional distress. A moody black and white portrait of her in her early teens hangs in Louboutin's garret office, next to the Prince William mask. Darkness and light. If Louboutin, despite his garrulousness, is vague about some details of his upbringing, it is because, he says, 'it was all very communal and fluid'. A boho crowd, most of them much older, flitted in an out of the flat he shared with the photographer while Louboutin dutifully took himself off to school and later technical college, although he seems to have been even more diligent about taking himself off to Paris's many flourishing nightclubs. In the 1970s nowhere was more louche or more hip than Paris. And nowhere in Paris was more louche or more hip than Le Palace nightclub, haunt of Mitterrands and Jaggers, Grace Jones, the literary theorist Roland Barthes - and the 14-year-old Louboutin, whose nickname rapidly became Christian Palace. It was, we can safely say, an unorthodox education. He learnt his excellent English from listening to what he calls 'Anglo-Saxon' songs. At 11 I was singing "I wanna put a spike in my veins." At 15 he was a regular at the theatre, absorbing Pinter and Racine with equal enthusiasm. If you slipped in at the interval, you could see anything for free. We saw a lot of plays - only half of them, but that made you sharp because you had to work out what was going on. When the intellectual process of reconstructing the missing first half got too onerous, he would drop into the Folies Bergères, one of the oldest music halls in Paris. No stories. Just song after song. So you focus on different things. Louboutin focused on the dancers' footwear. 'I'd already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist? He rang the Folies, announced that he wanted to design shoes for the dancers and became a sort of mascot. 'Not that I ever designed a single shoe for them,' he adds ruefully. But I got them coffee - and veal. So much veal. I couldn't work out how they could eat it all. It turned out they were using it to pad their shoes to make them more comfortable. The problem with being teacher's pet is that eventually you fall from favour. One day a dancer told him to get out from under her legs. I understand. They have tough lives. He got out, and never went back. 'That's partly because they never asked me back,' he says wryly. And they never paid me in the first place. So I thought, come on Christian, you're 18 now, you have to get a proper job. You can't be flaky any more.' Almost equally abundant as his talent is Louboutin's charm. It twinkles mischievously in his designs, which are often playful and witty. It is what helped him secure a job as the head of shoe design at Charles Jourdan, despite turning up for the interview with a hangover. Not from the night before. It was a general permanent hangover at that time. Charles Jourdan sent him to its factory in the middle of France. 'I arrived with four suitcases of clothes and this guy with a big moustache says, "We don't give a s*** here about Parisians." So that set the tone, the first day. He lasted one year, then jobbed for Maud Frizon, YSL and Chanel, where he designed the first quilted leather ballerina. 'Everyone thinks it's part of Coco's DNA, that shoe. But it hadn't been done before I got there.' Eventually he received a call from his hero, the shoe designer Roger Vivier, who invented the comma-shaped heel and had, in 1967, created Catherine Deneuve's shoe wardrobe for Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour . Even though Vivier, by then retired, was not looking for a designer but a secretary to help catalogue his shoes for an exhibition, Louboutin leapt at the chance. From Vivier I learnt everything - including civility. So overwhelmed by Vivier's savoir-faire was Louboutin that after he left he gave up shoe designing. 'If you worked for Picasso, you wouldn't want to paint, so I thought, I love it, but it's got to stop.' So at the age of 27, he retrained as a landscape gardener. You need patience to be a gardener, and patience is not Louboutin's forte. Also, he missed shoes. So in 1992, encouraged by his closest friends Henri and Bruno and the cheap rents in the rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, he opened his first shop. Had it not been for the Love Shoe, it might have ended there. He didn't even have his red soles. They came a year or two later. 'This shoe arrived back from the factory but for some reason it didn't look quite as good as my sketch.' A bottle of red nail polish on his assistant's desk proved to be a eureka moment, as Louboutin coated the underside of the shoe scarlet. 'Problem solved,' he says. That red, as has often been commented, represents both status and carnality. When Nan Kempner [the American socialite] tried on one of my shoes one time she said, "Oh my God, I look like a hooker. I have to have it. Then another woman came in later, a bit less, how shall we say, demure than Nan, and she tries the same shoe and says, "It's so classy. I'm taking it... That's why I'm so pissed off by this trial.' He is referring to his lawsuit against YSL, which recently used red soles in its shoe collection. His petition was rejected by an American court last August. The judge says people cannot own a colour. But Hermès has a patent on orange. Cadbury sued Nestlé and they have the purple trademark. So it's not finished. We appeal. Some people don't even know my name, but they know I am the man with the red soles.' Red, it seems, is currently as problematic for him as it is lucky. He has had three red Vespas - his favourite mode of transport - stolen in a month. 'There will be no more red Vespas,' he notes sadly. On a Vespa red is too alluring. There will, however, be a torrent of red in London when an exhibition celebrating his 20 years in business opens at the Design Museum nect month, not least the giant red sole that will serve as a catwalk for a hologram of Dita Von Teese. It will be a priceless opportunity for fans, fetishists and anoraks to study not only the decorativeness of his shoes but also their awesome construction (complete with toe cushions, thanks to the veal experience at the Folies). His great friend Diane von Furstenberg, a towering figure of female emancipation, says she loves his heels 'because they make men more chivalrous'. 'It's not about being weak or vulnerable,' Louboutin explains with the resignation of a man who has had the anti-heel lobby on his back for 40 years, 'but sometimes a woman might enjoy the paradox of being able to stand on a level with a man, yet also feel fragile.' He is less tolerant of those who complain about discomfort. Why not just wear pyjamas the whole time? When I started, women kept saying they liked the shoes but they couldn't run in them. It drove me crazy, so I thought today I will watch how many people are running and I went all round Paris and no one was running . Don't reject a shoe because you can't run in it. It's OK not to run. You see more. Christian Louboutin at the Design Museum, May 1 to July 9 (designmuseum.org)