

With funds from two backers, he opened a Paris shoe salon in 1991 with Princess Caroline of Monaco as his first customer. In the late 1980s, he turned away from fashion to become a landscape gardener and to contribute to Vogue but missed working with shoes and set up his company in 1991. Going on to serve as a freelance designer, Louboutin designed women's shoes for Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Maud Frizon. Louboutin became an apprentice in Vivier's atelier. Subsequently, Louboutin met Roger Vivier, who claims to have invented the stiletto, or spiked-heel shoe. The effort resulted in employment with Charles Jourdan. Louboutin returned to Paris in 1981, where he assembled a portfolio of drawings of elaborate high heels. "I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered." įascinated by world cultures, he ran away in his teens to Egypt and also spent a year in India. This image stayed in his mind, and he later used this idea in his designs. It was there that he saw a sign from Africa forbidding women wearing sharp stilettos from entering a building for fear of damage to the extensive wood flooring. Louboutin says his fascination with shoes began in 1976, when he visited the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie on the avenue Daumesnil. His little formal training included drawing and the decorative arts at the Académie d'Art Roederer. He was also a fixture on the city's party scene alongside Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol. His first job was at the Folies Bergères, the cabaret where he assisted the entertainers backstage. Going through a punk phase, he was in a few films, including 1979 cult classic Race d'ep and The Homosexual Century, which attracted an English-language audience.

Louboutin began sketching shoes in his early teens, ignoring his academic studies. He later remarked, "Everybody applauded! And I thought, 'Well, at least if I regret it I'm going to be like the sister of Sophia Loren!'"Īs a preteen he was one of the "bande du Palace", a group of hard partying teens and pre-teens that included Eva Ionesco, who were a fixture of the Parisian nightclub Le Palace.
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However, he claims that what helped him make up his mind was an interview on TV with Sophia Loren, in which she introduced her sister, saying she had to leave school when she was only 12, but when she turned 50, she got her degree. He faced much opposition when he decided to drop out from school. Louboutin was expelled from school three times and then decided to run away from home at the age of 12, at which point his mother allowed him to move out to live at a friend's house.
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But instead of feeling it was terrible and that I was an outsider who had to go and find my real family, I invented my own history, full of characters from Egypt because I was very into the pharaohs." In 2014, he learned from one of his sisters that his biological father was, in fact, an Egyptian with whom his mother Irene had been having a secret affair. My family was very French and so I decided they had probably adopted me. Louboutin said in a 2012 interview that he was "much darker-skinned than everyone else in his family. He was the only son of Roger, a cabinet-maker, and Irene, a French homemaker from Brittany. Louboutin was born and raised in Paris, France. Eidgenössisches Institut für Geistiges Eigentum (IGE) 4.1.5 Switzerland – Christian Louboutin vs.4.1.4 United States – Christian Louboutin vs.
