by Sarah Jessica Parker wore them to the Met Gala. (The alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, made the fashionistas a must.) Beyoncé wore a custom pair during her Renaissance tour (knee-high, studded with silver sequins). They have decorated the feet of puppets (Miss Piggy) and poets (Maya Angelou). Nicole Kidman wore them to Princess Diana’s funeral (suede, in black, naturally).
They are Christian Louboutin shoes. The iconic purple-dissolved heels have been a high fashion staple for decades.
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Now they can be found on a very different foot type. The French shoe designer is collaborating with Pierre Yovanovitch on nine limited edition chairs featuring “shoes” designed by Louboutin. Each chair is inspired by an allegorical or historical female muse, from Queen Nefertari and Josephine Baker to Louboutin’s friend, Dita Von Teese, the American vedette.
For Dita, they created silver platform heels with tassel heels reflecting Von Teese’s burlesque costumes. The Josefina is an homage to Baker’s signature jungle suits with mixed raffa, fringe and beading. Zenobi is inspired by the Palmyrene empress and features legs embellished with turquoise stones; they climb up the hind legs and encircle the front legs like ankle bracelets. And Nefertari has a laser-engraved lotus pattern seat, a favorite of both Yovanovitch and Louboutin, back in blue, terracotta and bronze with bronze heels that evoke the sarcophagus crown. Radicalla, named after an expression Yovanovitch often uses to describe a rigorous architectural approach, and Morphea, an homage to the Greek god of sleep, are hand-painted upholstery features by French artist Christophe Martin.
Starting Friday, the chairs will be on display at Yovanovitch’s New York atelier in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea. An open edition of “Simply Nude” chairs – a nod to Louboutin’s Nudes collection – is also available in different wood and upholstery options with shoes featuring the brand’s red lacquered sole.
“We have very different tastes in many ways,” Louboutin said. “But what we have in common is an obsession with detail and craftsmanship.”
The project is an evolution of Yovanovitch’s Monsieur Oops (Gérard) and Madam Oops (Catherine) chairs, released in 2017, with abstract male and female faces embroidered on the back of the chair with a simple shoe at the foot. “After that, I knew I wanted to do something bigger,” he said. The collaboration took two years.
“I like complicated things,” Yovanovitch said. “When it’s too simple it bores me.”
Through his mastery of proportion, light and colour, his dedication to craftsmanship and fine detail, Yovanovitch has created a distinctive style. There are flights of terror in his oeuvre: the Oops chairs; the Papa, Mama and Baby armchairs inspired by the Goldilocks fairy tale; chairs designed to conjure the owl. (In 2022, Mama Bear was added to the permanent collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.)
But the Louboutin project is a departure in several ways for Yovanovitch, who launched his furniture line in 2021 after two decades as an interior architect, and before that he was a menswear designer for Pierre Cardin. Combining Yovanovitch’s strict standards with the sexiness of Louboutin’s stiletto, the collaboration brings Yovanovitch’s haute-couture aesthetic to its literal interpretation.
“For me the project was always smooth, it almost felt like a vacation,” said Yovanovitch. “The chair is very serious, solid wood, very clean lines and the little shoe that Christian makes on each foot of the chair, they are very happy, funny. It’s the same with us – I’m serious and it’s always fun. I’m shy; he is very extroverted. And I think the other character does something very interesting.”
Yovanovitch and Louboutin have known each other for years. They first became friends after Yovanovitch contracted Louboutin’s boyfriend, the master landscape designer Louis Benech, to landscape the gardens of Yovanovitch and his partner Matthieu Cussac’s 17th-century chateau in Provence, which they bought in 2009. Benech gave Louboutin for a weekend visit to the château. “We clicked immediately,” Louboutin said.
In 2015, Yovanovitch designed the interior of the first Louboutin beauty store in the 19th centurytharcades of this century of the Galerie Véro-Dodat, near the Louvre. “It was a tiny warehouse, like a little treasure box,” Louboutin said. “I immediately saw his talent with light, light is so important when you have a small space.”
When Yovanovitch called Louboutin to ask him to collaborate on some chairs, Louboutin immediately said “yes”. “I said to Pierre, ‘You know, my father was a carpenter. So, everything to do with wood and carving, I’m totally into it. But I’m not going to make a small shoe at the end of a chair. The chair is like the human body, a chair leg also has legs. So let me work on the feet, not the shoe.’ And he agreed.”
Yovanovitch first thought of making male and female chairs, in memory of Catherine and Gerard. But, he said, “for men, the leg was not very sexy. The woman’s leg is prettier. With my carpenter, we created the shape of the legs. We did many, many, many shapes to finally choose the one we both like.”
“The chairs are very feminine,” said Louboutin. “The shape, it’s all about curves.”
Fifteen different craftsmen – including the embroiderers Maisons Vermont, Lesage Interieurs and Montox, furniture designers Atelier Jouffre and Hugo Delavelle, leather specialist Audrey Ludwig and Martin, the painter – worked on each chair. Some of the chairs are quite simple and minimalistic; Simply put, Nudes has a carved wooden leg with a red painted base, Morphea has gold painted legs that fade into the blonde wooden leg. Others, like Dita, are more theatrical; Metropolissa features a silver leather shoe with a stiletto that floats above the floor, an homage to Fritz Lang’s 1920s sci-fi epic “Metropolis.” But all of them needed to be functional. “People are going to sit on it,” Yovanovitch said. “It’s a piece of sculpture but I want it to be a useful piece as well.”
Yovanovitch decided to show the chairs in New York because the American market is more adventurous in its acceptance of the avant garde. (The US is Yovanovitch’s largest retail market.)
“American people are more open to something fun like that, I also thought maybe there is some Christian friend, in show business or a singer, who would like them. I don’t have this type of client, my clients are more classic,” he said.
Some of the chairs have already been sold. (The muse chairs are $28,000, and the Nudes are $13,000.) They will have to create additional versions of these custom pieces. “But they won’t be exactly the same,” said Yovanovitch, “how could they be?”
Surveying the chairs, which are displayed on an elevated crimson runway before the opening night reception, Yovanovitch noted that Martin’s hand-painted upholstery will be different. And the lead time will probably be six months. Louboutin walked over wearing a black Dolly Parton T-shirt under a denim shirt. Scrolling through his phone, he said, “People want a table to go with the chair. Can we make a table?”
