Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (38 page)

One day a friend gave him a book about Roger Vivier, the shoe designer for Christian Dior in the
1950
s, who is credited with inventing the stiletto. Paging through the book, Louboutin realized he’d found his calling. At sixteen, he was hired to design shoes for the famed Folies Bergères cabaret, and learned how to make them solid enough to withstand professional dancing and high kicks. In his twenties, he worked as a shoe designer at Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Charles Jourdan, which at the time produced Dior’s shoes, and helped curate a museum retrospective for Vivier, who was by then in his seventies. “Vivier taught me that the most important part of the shoe is the body and the heel,” says Louboutin. “Like good bone structure, if you get that right, the rest is makeup.”

When the exhibit concluded, Louboutin needed a job. He knew he didn’t want to return to working for the big brands. “It was no longer my dream,” he told me. “I asked myself, ‘Do you want to work for others for the rest of your life?’” He thought about founding his own shoe company, but he says, “I didn’t want to show my shoes to retailers in an old leather suitcase in an office in a bad building in New York.” While he was shopping in the passage Véro-Dodat in Paris’s Second Arrondissement, he ran into antique gallery owner Eric Philippe, who mentioned that a retail space was available down the way. Louboutin raised approximately $
200
,
000
from his savings and the investments of two friends, signed the lease and in November
1991
opened his shop. It was a jewel box of a design, with cubbyholes in the walls, each containing one shoe or two shoes. “If you make a precious environment, then what’s inside is precious, too,” he told me.

He produced his first shoes in a little factory called Evelyne Shoes in Nice. “They were nice, but they were not taking me seriously and they were really too slow,” Louboutin remembers. They were also quite expensive: a single pair of shoes cost about $
110
if Louboutin supplied the skin and $
125
if the factory supplied the skin. “First cost!” Louboutin recalled, rolling his eyes. “Can you imagine?” His retail price was double, plus
20
percent VAT, making his shoes a pricey $
270
to $
300
a pair.

One of his first customers was Princess Caroline, who, while trying on Louboutin’s pumps, declared to her friend that they were “so Anouk Aimée,” referring to the chic French movie star. As it happened, the other person in the boutique was a reporter from
W
magazine. When the article was published with Princess Caroline’s public anointment, Louboutin became an instant luxury star. The American retailers came that March to buy for the winter
1992
–
1993
season, and, as Louboutin remembers, “I had no shoes. I had never considered retailers wanting to buy my shoes. There are no luxury department stores in France. The French do not go to a department store for luxury goods. I was like Guerlain, who had his boutique and no distribution.” The buyers found Louboutin’s shoes to be quite expensive. When he explained that his source was costly, they said, “Why don’t you go to Italy?”

He took their advice and found a factory in Lombardy that was more efficient and half the price. He liked the place because it was spotless and they made gorgeous shoes. “If you do luxury,” Louboutin explained, “you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can’t ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.” Though his reputation and production were rising, his company was still minuscule: himself, an administration person, and a part-time salesgirl in the shop. “When I wasn’t in Italy,” he remembered, “I was in the store, selling.”

His third season, he added his signature scarlet sole. Within three years, he broke even and paid off his debts. In
1997
, he opened a store on the Left Bank in Paris. Then came stores in London, New York, and Beverly Hills. In
2003
, he opened a franchise in Moscow. “I wasn’t excited about doing a franchise,” he said, but “franchises are good for places you don’t visit, or are foreign to you. A franchise is like a translator in a country you do not understand.” In
2007
, he is opening in Las Vegas.

The secret to Louboutin’s success is his ability to balance the industrial and the exclusive. He will turn out twenty thousand pairs of an elegant, classic pump, but he also designs what he calls Cinderella shoes, delicate treasures that he produces in an extremely limited run. “I have a small piece of batik from Mali that I want to use,” he told me. “I think I can do twenty pairs of shoes with it: ten for two different stores. This way, a woman can have the pleasure of having a shoe she’ll never see anywhere else and another shoe that is a great shoe.” In addition to the Cinderella shoes, Louboutin offers a made-to-measure service where, like couture, you can change the height or the color of a design or come up with something brand new and have it fitted to your foot. “That’s why I keep the company on a human scale,” he says. “If I lost the laboratory, I’d lose the pleasure of design.”

The other reason his company flourishes is simple: integrity. “I remember my father cutting wood,” he told me. “If you sculpt in the vein, it’s beautiful. If you go against the grain, it breaks. Same goes with business. If you go with the flow, it grows naturally. But if you try to grow your company in an unnatural way, it breaks…I did not do a company to make money. I made shoes and it became a company.”

Naturally, the luxury tycoons have been circling for a few years now. The first bite came at a dinner party for eight at a private home in Paris in
2000
. Louboutin found himself sitting on the sofa surrounded by four top businessmen.

“When can we buy a bit of your company?” one asked eagerly.

“I felt like a girl being invited to dance,” Louboutin recalled. “I blushed and said, ‘No thank you.’”

“My company grew little by little, and one of the reasons is because I handle everything,” Louboutin told me. “I don’t have any desire to rush, to concentrate on too many markets. If I did, I would lose the core of my work, which is designing shoes.”

Yet Louboutin doesn’t completely dismiss the idea of selling. “If there is a moment I no longer want to play this game and I could cash out and do something with that money to help the poor and the sick,” he said, “then I’d sell.”

O
N A COOL SPRING
morning in Paris, I was chatting with a Hollywood producer friend who was in town and told him about this book.

“Fine,” he said, sizing up the story like a movie pitch. “I see where you’re going with this: luxury companies have gone mass and along the way forgotten their original mission, which was to provide the rich with truly exceptional products. So here’s what I want to know: What do the rich do now?”

“That’s a good question,” I answered. “I’ll find out.”

I thought back to my visit to the Vuitton factory in Asnières. Along with watching the seamstresses and technicians churn out hundreds of logo bags, I saw the craftsmen making a large square wooden jewelry case covered in python. Nothing on the box identified it as Louis Vuitton—no monogram, no label—and though I am not particularly keen on reptiles, I found it to be exceptionally beautiful. It was a one-of-a-kind special order, I was told, for a “good client.” Anyone with enough jewelry to fill it, I said to myself, must be a very good client indeed.

For the ultimate in lingerie, the rich go to Alice Cadolle in Paris, a couture house specializing in undergarments run by Poupie Cadolle, the great-great-granddaughter of founder Herminie Cadolle, who invented the bra back in
1889
. The experience of having a custom-made bra at Cadolle is luxury in the old-fashioned sense of the term: genuine personal attention, exquisite materials, beautiful handcraftsmanship, all to create something just for you. Poupie, a genial blonde with a knowing smile, receives you in her salmon-colored salon with plum velvet drapes and Herminie’s Napoleon III sofas, asks you what you’re looking for, and takes your measurements. She has four hundred basic designs to choose from and then alters the pattern to fit your body. You select the fabric—although she prefers to work with lace and tulle—and you choose the color, although Poupie pushes black. “I find that
95
percent of the women look beautiful in black,” she told me. “It looks good against their skin.”

Poupie makes about
550
made-to-measure bras a year,
100
strapless bras,
50
girdle-like foundations (“for ample women to wear under couture gowns,” she said), and
30
traditional lace-up corsets for clients who include several movie stars, one queen, and a few of the showgirls from the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. She makes corsets for films as well, including for Juliette Binoche in
Chocolat,
Monica Bellucci in
How Much Do You Love Me?
, and the cast of the French retro whodunit
8 Women.
Four times a year, Poupie travels to New York to see her regular American clients. The basic bra requires three fittings and costs about $
800
. Matching underwear is $
160
to $
400
, depending on the fabric.

A few years ago, a corporation offered to buy Cadolle. “I said no,” Poupie told me. “We have been independent for
120
years, we can be for another
50
.” She’s grooming her pretty twenty-eight-year-old daughter Patricia to take over when she retires. In
2005
, Poupie had to move out of the building where her great-grandmother Alice set up shop in
1911
. It was a charming old place with a clackety gated elevator and a plush salon with red-velvet drapes. Today, it is part of a half-block-long Roberto Cavalli store.

The really rich still buy and wear couture, which runs from $
20
,
000
for a basic suit to $
100
,
000
for an evening gown. But the regulars generally do not pay full price. “We’re dickering, we’re in the Armenian rug dealer stage,” life-long couture client Nan Kempner told me a few years ago regarding a Dior couture jacket she loved but found to be overpriced. “One has one’s priorities,” she said.

She got the jacket.

I remember attending a fitting for one of Dior’s best clients one afternoon in the avenue Montaigne couture salons. She ordered eight or ten gowns with matching made-to-measure shoes. When she was presented the bill, the vendeuse made sure to point out that these were special prices. The message was clear: if you buy couture in bulk, you get a discount.

The really rich do not attend the couture shows either. “Most of the Chanel clients are not here,” Karl Lagerfeld told me after the Chanel couture show in July
2006
. “They have other things to do, you know? But the oceans are crossed by private jets for fittings.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“New fortunes. Huge fortunes. People who are richer than air. People we don’t really know—we know if the money is clean—but people who don’t want to be identified. It’s not the red carpet. Whenever you have the dress on the red carpet, those women, they cancel their order immediately. The women who buy couture don’t want to be identified with actresses.”

“Where do they live?”

“China, there are more than a couple.”

A few days later, Chanel’s head seamstress and one of its vendeuses were flown with the collection to China for the weekend on a private jet. “There will always be a need for haute couture,” socialite São Schlumberger told me, “because there will be people who, if it exists in red, will want it in white, who want quality, something special for themselves, something where there aren’t dozens of the same.”

In the United States, the rich shop at Giorgio Armani. The wealthiest
5
percent of Americans account for
47
percent of all sales in Armani-owned stores, Victoria Cantrell, senior vice president and chief information officer for Giorgio Armani Corporation, said in
2006
.

For jewelry, the rich prefer custom-made. The French fine jeweler Boucheron, owned by Gucci Group, reported in
2005
that special orders were up
15
percent a year.

For handbags, they order Hermès.

Yet they also shop at outlets. When I was at the Desert Hills Premium Outlets in August
2006
, I spotted a shiny young couple loading shopping bags into the trunk of their ivory Maybach
62
sedan—which at the time sold for more than $
380
,
000
new. When I tried on a pair of black leather mules at the Sergio Rossi outlet later that afternoon—which, at half price, still ran $
200
—the saleswoman told me, “We had a princess in here the other day who so loved those shoes she bought them in every color. She comes here every season.”

They demand and take advantage of perks, such as personal shoppers who not only pull clothes for private viewings and fittings in plush salons but also cater to a customer’s every whim. Danielle Morolo, a personal shopper at the Americana Manhasset luxury shopping center in Manhasset, New York, packs customers’ suitcases. She runs errands—once it was all the way Palm Springs—and she spent part of her vacation in Florence to hunt down lace for a customer. “I’ve had people call me from the office and ask me to go to their homes and pick something out of the closet because they didn’t like what they were wearing,” she said. “I have the security codes to clients’ homes.”

They don’t even have to show up to shop. “My best customer lives in Atlanta, but hasn’t been in the store since the Super Bowl
2000
,” said Jeffrey Kalinsky, owner of the trendy fashion boutique Jeffrey in Atlanta and in downtown New York. “We mail her a package every week, she picks out what she wants, and sends the rest back. These days, we go to them.” Los Angeles retailer Tracey Ross regularly secures tickets to
American Idol
or movie premieres for customers, and sends customized gift baskets to their homes or hotel rooms.