That is, until “one day I had lunch with John and Alexis [Roche, his partner], and he said, out of the blue, ‘Would you consider doing something with me?’ And immediately I said ‘Yes of course!’ John was very, very happy. And suddenly he was a shower of ideas. This was a milestone in his story because he was so, so, so, into it. He was drowned by it, and so excited and so precise, and so full of his creative energy.” Galliano “always loved shoes but he’s never made them,” as Louboutin explains, so he has assembled key figures who have brought their skills to the medium, “and I’m very happy and proud to be one of them,” adds Louboutin. “You know, it’s funny when you work. We worked almost a year ahead, and it was very complicated—because his clothes are incredibly complicated to do because of the faux cul [the false bottom] and so on. Everything was on a level of couture that is almost never reached.”
Ultimately, the show was a triumph; a swansong for John Galliano’s extraordinary decade at Maison Margiela. “It was of a perfection,” says Louboutin, “that evening, with the drizzle under the bridge.” The show was held under the Pont Alexandre III bridge in Paris, where Galliano had conjured a sort of thread bare 1930s boite. It was a Brassai moment, with Pat McGrath’s extraordinary second skin, shining face masks.
“Even if I was expecting something which was going to be great, I was not necessarily ready to have such a vision of such an impactful show. It’s one thing that you can expect from very, very few designers, and you can expect this from him,” says Louboutin. “The level of emotion involved in the show, not only in the clothes, but in the show itself: it was a really magical moment. You know, it’s poetry and magic. Even just talking about it makes me emotional! It took 40 years of John Galliano to make me cry at a show,” remembers Louboutin. “…And the shoes!”
So now, taking a deep breath after the show of shows, Louboutin has worked on a second collection for Maison Margiela, the silhouettes drawn from the show. They have outlined a few stores, “So they will be sold at Margiela and they will be sold at Louboutin!” he exults. “Ever since I’ve known John,” Louboutin continues, “he has a kind of passion for tribal clothes, [clothes] from plays, from dance, from Kabuki. His brain is built boiling around that anyway.”
