You go into a dark exhibition space where you’re faced with a high wall of dull red shoe lasts, each dangling from string like offal in some surreal butcher’s shop display. Round the corner you find your way into a fairground cum cabaret. Louboutin’s shoes – lots of them – are displayed singly on merry-go-round chairs, in a privet arbour favoured by stately homes, and on a turntable lit with dressing-room bulbs where mirrored surfaces show each shoe from every possible angle. Beyond, people are sitting in the pointed ‘toe’ of a giant, signature Louboutin red-soled shoe, apparently watching a cabaret dancer in black lace basque and suspenders, with an exaggeratedly hourglass figure. She’s magically there and not there and as the dance sequence finishes she morphs into a be-jewelled high heeled shoe, a sophisticated hologram effect. What you learn is that Louboutin’s shoes are not just about creating a particular kind of feminine look; they are using that look, and the body associated with it, as a kind of ‘last’. The shoes mimic the lines of the hourglass body: the low ‘décolleté’ cutaway at the front creates a second cleavage that is erotic or disturbing, depending on the viewer’s perspective; and as the shoe curves outwards around the wearer’s heel and inwards for the shoe’s heel, that hourglass shape is repeated. Quotes from Louboutin himself confirm this: it’s not the fabric or colour of the shoe that matters most. It’s the silhouette or line. When we go shoe shopping with women taking part in the If the Shoe Fits project, the precise curve of a heel can be a deal breaker. I went expecting some sort of exotic elegance and initially found the full-on diversity and extravagance of the shoes almost vulgar, trashy even, but not in a good way. Again, a quote from Louboutin asserts that he has no time whatsoever for minimalism. By the time I left the exhibition – and the white leather jeans that ‘grew’ into white leather boots, the Guinness cans wrapped around the heels of a pair of black patent shoes, the fish skin-covered shoes (in mackerel or salmon), the mules decorated with the garbage from a seamstress’s floor, the Rolls Royce engine- fronted shoes, the Marie Antoinette shoes (complete with anachronistic galleon) – I was won over by an exuberance and playfulness I hadn’t anticipated. And this wealth of materials, London Design Museum March – July 2012 Prof Jenny Hockey Principle Investigator ‘If the Shoe Fits: Footwear, Identity & Transition’ July 2012 Department of Sociological Studies, The University of Sheffield www.sheffield.ac.uk/iftheshoefits/ Louboutin Retrospective