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The man behind the Maison

Christian Louboutin’s career began with a sign—not one from the heavens, but a literal sign posted at the Museum of African and Oceanic Art—forbidding women from wearing stilettos, lest they scratch the parquet flooring. Little did 10-year-old Christian know that he had happened upon the subject of his life’s work.Raised with his three sisters, the Parisian-born designer has always been intimately aware of the nuances that define the female condition. For Christian Louboutin, every woman is a work of art, a goddess meant to be celebrated, a life source of limitless power that ought to be unleashed. At the age of 16, he began an internship at the famed Folies Bergère, where the self-taught shoemaker began dressing the dancers’ feet with his designs