The French shoe designer Christian Louboutin recently made his first trip to Washington, where he signed the distinctive red soles of his famously artful slingbacks and sandals. Louboutin’s heels are favourites among fashion’s usual suspects: starlets, editors, stylists. But they are also worn by professional women—from social secretaries to lawyers—who believe the right shoes can elevate an ensemble and who do not get nosebleeds when they are boosted to rarefied heights.

Louboutin has been creating his signature shoes with their stupendously high heels since 1992 and regularly makes public appearances during which he has even been asked to sign a customer’s derriere.

Louboutin is not a man who bites his tongue, nor is he one to edit his own creativity. A 40-something gentleman with hooded eyes, a buzz-cut pate and a devilish demeanour, he says his friends in Europe don’t quite understand the concept of a fashion “P.A.”—

or public appearance. Europeans tend to

look at him with baffled curiosity and ask, “What do you mean people are in line waiting for you to sign a shoe?”

That kind of fashion fan mania is a particularly American phenomenon, and Louboutin suspects that he benefits from the glamour associated with French design and its long history. It also helps that his is one of the rare, well-known French brands in which the name on the label actually belongs to the fellow working at the design table. “It’s my name; it’s me. At Balmain, it’s not Balmain,” he says. “The French have been spoiled on the fashion side for over 100 years.”

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