Christian Louboutin’s first designed shoes were not high heels, but a pair of flats. You would never have guessed!
That’s right, it’s the pair of flats with the word “LOVE” on them. The story behind the design of these shoes is also very interesting. LOVE is the first pair of shoes designed by Christian Louboutin.
He was inspired by a photo of Princess Diana sitting in front of the Taj Mahal, looking at her shoes with a sad expression. He then designed these LOVE flats with the intention that from Princess Diana’s perspective, she would see the word “LOVE” on her shoes, dispelling the sadness captured in that photo.
Louboutin was a big fan of the princess, and he could sense that there was something wrong. He could tell the differences in her emotions from constantly seeing her photos in the media. “Even if you don’t want to, [you are] expressing your states of mind,” he said. That particular photo inspired him to send her a message through a pair of black flats with the word letters L and O scrawled across the right foot and V and E along the left in red patent leather.
“You could see she was looking at the floor and feeling so desperate, bored, and sad or something, and I thought if there was a message on her feet saying, hi, hello, like a little mouse saying something to her, that maybe she would have a smile,” recalled Louboutin, who rereleased the shoe in a 2018 Love-themed capsule collection. “So I just did a drawing of joined legs, her attitude, looking at that, and I thought, If only there was love there, maybe she would be happier. So I just wrote love and I put it just as the two feet together because she was always posing like that.”
