Last season, Racked, the shopping Web site, live-blogged the Louboutin sample sale: “9:02am: Staffers keep shifting the line location. There is a Louboutin manicure, in which the underside of the nail is painted with scarlet polish. People make marriage proposals in his boutiques. (He offers them a discount.) Still, he has elicited the most frenzied attention to soles since the days of Adlai Stevenson. Louboutin does not advertise, and he says that he does not give shoes to celebrities. All-Star Game, Carla Bruni strides into No. Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum, in Toronto, told me, “Louboutin took a part of the shoe that had previously been ignored and made it not only visually interesting but commercially useful.” With flickers of telltale color, Louboutin’s shoes issue their own press releases: Oprah interviews George W. They are also a marketing gimmick that renders an otherwise indistinguishable product instantly recognizable. Like Louis XIV’s red heels, they signal a sort of sumptuary code, promising a world of glamour and privilege. The red soles offer the pleasure of secret knowledge to their wearer, and that of serendipity to their beholder. The sole of each of his shoes is lacquered in a vivid, glossy red. Louboutin sells more than five hundred thousand pairs of shoes a year, at prices ranging from three hundred and ninety-five dollars, for an espadrille, to six thousand, for a “super-platform” pump covered in thousands of crystals. Louboutin said one day, in the course of praising a Viennese fetish boot from the nineteenth century, “A shoe has so much more to offer than just to walk.” A shoe can be an icebreaker, or an inkblot. (The offices of fashion magazines often smell like locker rooms, owing to the rows of stale sneakers and ballerina flats that lurk beneath the desks of carless career women.) To Louboutin, shoes are less interesting for their physical properties than for their psychological ones. But, somewhere between the Chalcolithic age and the Kardashians, shoes went from abetting to embellishing, and even impeding, the feet as a way of getting from one place to another. In 2008, in a cave in Armenia, scientists discovered what is thought to be the world’s oldest leather shoe, a fifty-five-hundred-year-old cowhide moccasin-a woman’s size 7-with laces and straw padding. (Instead of working under armed protection, as the client wanted him to, Louboutin paved the soles in zircons and shipped them to Hong Kong, where the decoys were replaced with real gems.) For a private client, a mine owner, he made a pair of shoes with ruby soles. He has designed pairs of shoes with heels of mismatched heights. In homage to the Surrealists, Louboutin once created a pair of pumps with a hydrodynamic shape, a bulging eye above the pinkie toe, and tessellating rows of black and gold scales-the foot as a fish. People have a strong relationship to their body, and it was quite moving, I thought, that this person, who is paralyzed, still cares about what’s correct for her feet.” “I thought, If I were in a wheelchair, I’d like to be in super-high heels,” Louboutin said. The scene, Louboutin said, was “something out of Buñuel.” A similar thing had happened once before, when a disabled woman showed up at a signing session-Louboutin autographs shoes, as an author does books-and presented him with a pump of medium height. Her passenger had a blanket over her lap and, on her feet, a pair of golden shoes that, glinting in the sunlight, looked as though they were encrusted with coins. Two women came around a corner, unwitting participants in a street-corner défilé. Somewhere in the Second Arrondissement, a traffic light turned red.

Louboutin opened up the throttle on Rue de Rivoli. We accelerated tipsily and zoomed off into Paris traffic, dodging bollards and side mirrors. He pushed the visor up and mounted the machine. The bike, a navy-blue model, was parked by the curb. He had just had lunch at a brasserie near his office. One afternoon in early March, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin decided to go for a ride on his Vespa. “A shoe has so much more to offer than just to walk,” he says.

Red bottom shoes