PARIS — In a 12 months of artistic reshuffles throughout the style business, Christian Louboutin is throwing his hat into the ring: the billionaire shoemaker is taking a primary step towards succession by bringing in a brand new artistic director for the boys’s class.
Jaden Smith, the kid actor turned musician and multi-disciplinary trend artistic, will lead Louboutin’s males’s line beginning with a primary capsule assortment to be revealed in Paris in January.
Louboutin launched males’s in 2010 as demand bubbled up for the spiked sneakers he had initially created as a customized design for pop singer Mika. The model opened a devoted boutique for males in 2011 on Paris’ Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the spiked motif — impressed by the poster for 1975 dystopian thriller “Roller Ball” — discovered its approach onto velvet slippers, sneakers, backpacks and toiletry circumstances.
While curiosity in Louboutin’s spiked sneakers has since waned, the model’s gross sales to males have continued to climb, powered by surging demand for extra traditional costume sneakers that includes Louboutin’s signature purple leather-based soles. Men’s merchandise now make up 24 % of the general enterprise, the corporate mentioned.
“We started men’s much later than women’s but it’s become really big. Overseeing it to the level that I look after the women’s was taking so, so much time,” Louboutin mentioned. One day in late 2024 throughout his morning swim on the Cheval Blanc lodge in Paris, “I was thinking about how I needed someone else to drive the boat — and that person should be the little one Jaden.”
Louboutin had met Smith a number of years earlier, and felt the Hollywood scion had one thing particular: he’s multi-disciplinary, “generous” in his approach of sharing house with the individuals with the musicians and artists he collaborates with, and has “incredible style — not set in a specific look, but always adventuring,” he mentioned.
Not least, “he’s very, very, very, very, very well brought-up,” Louboutin mentioned. “That’s a rare quality, and one that counts for me.”
Louboutin has proven his fondness for the “well-brought-up” earlier than: After rebuffing takeover provides from numerous traders for years, he lastly accepted a minority funding in 2021 from Exor–the funding automobile of the Agnellis, Italy’s royal household of society and enterprise.
Exor purchased 24 % of the corporate at a €2.25 billion valuation, confirming Louboutin’s standing as a self-made billionaire.
Since the funding, the model has renovated its Paris flagship, opened a bigger-than-ever outpost in Shanghai and entered new markets like Austin, Texas. The model is in search of to broaden in new classes as properly, inking an eyewear deal with Marcolin.
In a 2024 letter to traders, Exor chairman John Elkann mentioned Louboutin was “delivering strong financial performance while continuing to innovate” and “progressing towards its target of passing the €1 billion revenue mark,” regardless of a slowing total marketplace for luxurious items that led the agency to write down the estimated worth of its stake within the model by €125 million.
While gross sales are declining for giant luxurious teams like LVMH and Kering, enterprise is “holding up well” this 12 months and even persevering with to develop by single digits for Louboutin. He credit sturdy enchantment within the extra resilient US market, as properly as paying shut consideration to entry-level costs, ensuring the corporate continues to promote fascinating types beneath the $1,000 mark, which is “an important psychological threshold.”
With ladies’s sneakers driving progress, the model is taking the chance to reinvigorate its males’s line with a brand new imaginative and prescient and goals to get better a few of the pleasure round its debut, which rapidly captured the eye of high-profile musicians, actors and athletes: “people who have to stand and deliver,” Louboutin mentioned.
With his show-business pedigree, Smith, aged 27, felt like an apt alternative to lead the trouble. He first achieved fame as a toddler starring alongside his father Will in 2006’ “The Pursuit of Happiness”, adopted by 2010’s “Karate Kid” remake.
Since then, Smith has transitioned away from performing, placing out music, movies and trend by means of the collective MSFTSrep, which he based with his sister Willow in 2012. The collective explores spiritualism, “alternative history” and environmentalism with genre-crossing music incorporating rock and rap, and clothes that fosters an individualistic model.
Smith has labored with Louis Vuitton as a pal of the home since 2016 — usually showcasing gender-fluid model in womenswear designer Nicolas Ghesquière’s creations. He’s additionally experimented with extra absurdist gestures, like a castle-shaped headdress he wore to the Grammy’s this 12 months.
Smith additionally has a baggage model, Harper Collective, co-founded with longtime Selfridges govt Sebastien Manes in 2023.
“As an African-American designer, coming into a heritage fashion house and bringing my kind of Duchampian, more Dadaist fashion perspective into it — I’m just really excited to get started and to create something really special,” Smith mentioned.
He’s already frolicked with the model’s ateliers and suppliers, starting to study in regards to the craft of shoemaking, however says he sees his precept mission as “building a world — building a community around the brand, creating a narrative and then using that narrative to design.”
As a designer who parlayed his fantastical sketches into alternatives to study on the job at Charles Jourdan and Roger Vivier, Louboutin agrees with the method: “I quickly realised I was meant to focus on the imaginary — you can lose a lot of time trying to become technically skilled if that’s not your thing,” he mentioned. “Jaden will bring his touch more generally, through campaigns and photographs, through his unique way of looking at the worlds that interest him.”