Giant Crystal Stiletto Takes Center Stage At Christian Louboutin Exhibition In Monaco

At first glance, the shoe is hard to discern. At the center of the Treasure Room, which brings together some of the designer’s most extravagant creations, sits a traditional Spanish palanquin, a shoulder-borne litter, typically used for carrying nobility or religious effigies during parades. Like everything else in the exhibition, it is exquisitely made, handcrafted by Spanish coppersmiths and decorated with drapes embroidered in the studio of Indian couturier Sabyasachi Mukherjee.

Flanked by roses in silver urns, softly lit by a bank of church candles and ornate candelabras, a two-meter-tall Christian Louboutin stiletto rises up from its silver and gold altar, like a crystal slipper for a giant-sized Cinderella. Designed to look as if it were hewn from an enormous lump of rock crystal, it almost glows.

Created by French artist Stéphane Gérard, the sculpture was initially milled from a bespoke block of acrylic crystal in Germany, before Gérard’s atelier added the artist’s signature finish by hand. From its three-tonne initial mass, the final sculpture weighed in at 700kg and took over three months to make. Like the perfect metaphor for the designer’s art, it reigns over some of the most exquisitely bejeweled, feathered and embroidered hand-made shoes from the Louboutin archives.

Just one room out of 14, the Treasure Room makes for a breathtaking centerpiece to L’Exhibition[niste] II, a Louboutin retrospective that also encompasses his wide-ranging inspirations, through art and artifacts from around the world. The exhibition initially opened in 2020 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, a favorite childhood destination for the young Louboutin, before the coronavirus pandemic hit. It was open for just three weeks, during which time Princess Caroline of Monaco, a long-standing client and close friend of the designer, visited and suggested it re-open bigger and better, in Monaco.

After two years of false starts, the show opened July 9 at the Grimaldi Forum, and in two weeks, has already seen over 10,000 visitors. From the first shoe Louboutin ever made – a fish skin-covered pump made in 1987 while he was working for Roger Vivier – to a foretaste of Spring-Summer 2023 with the studded Pumpkin Pump, via the iconic Pigalle, the exhibition is a riot of a journey through his imagination and a fascinating exploration of the art and travel that have influenced him along the way.

For Louboutin, the Grimaldi Forum represented a blank canvas, “freedom of design and narration that allowed me to re-imagine my own exhibition without constraint”. The Forum is across the road from the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, which lent several works, and is currently showing Newton, Riviera, a magnificently sun-soaked overview of the photographer’s oeuvre. Both artists are fascinated by artifice and in a neat example of art world intertextuality, Newton’s True or False – A Murder Scene is on display, featuring one of those famous red soles; while back at the Forum, Louboutin included the photographer’s Big Nude III in the Imaginary Museum, a room full of inspirations and influences that dialog with the art of the shoe.

Opposite Newton’s Big Nude, almost in response to it, is a 16th century portrait of a French aristocrat called Louis de Beauvau. “The painting had an immediate effect on me,” says Louboutin, “there’s one thing that you see straight away, and that’s this man’s legs.” The shapely thighs and the shoes that match his tights elongate the line of the leg to make them seem longer. The designer uses the same technique with his Nudes line, developed in nine leg-lengthening skin-tone shades.

Alongside a feathered headdress worn by Josephine Baker and an ancient Egyptian mummy’s foot case, is Lunae Lumen Satine Mummy Blue (above) by Dior Haute Joaillerie Creative Director Victoire de Castellane. The serpentine lacquered gold, platinum, emerald and diamond necklace presented on a sand-cast silver rock as an objet d’art, was made in 2013 as part of her individual practice as a sculptor. The piece recalls some of the vibrant hues of Louboutin’s paste gem-set shoes in the preceding rooms.

As a fellow master of the curved line and the female body, British pop artist Allen Jones features with several pieces, including a new digitization of the metal body suit worn by Kate Moss on the cover of Pop magazine in 2013, Allen’s first foray into digital art. His exploration of the female body complements Fetishism, a room towards the end of the exhibition created in collaboration with David Lynch to showcase his photographs of fetish shoes designed by Louboutin.

Louboutin “likes interminglings of civilizations when each brings the best of itself to the other” and as a body of work, his rich shoe art is just that; a glorious mash-up of widely drawn influences from art and culture. L’Exhibitioniste II delves deep into the imagination of one of the 20th century’s most recognized designers, to prove that great art – whether a painting, a photograph, a dress or a shoe – can never exist in a vacuum.

L’Exhibition[niste] II is at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo, Monaco, until August 28.

Newton, Riviera, is at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco in Monte Carlo, Monaco, until November 13, alongside Christian Bérard, Eccentric Modernist, a retrospective of a little-known but prolific early 20th century artist and designer, until October 16.