While he surely didn’t intend it as such, Christian Louboutin’s new exhibition in Paris is something of a manifesto for cultural appreciation, and an eloquent riposte to those who prefer to cry cultural appropriation.
“It’s so important to be interested in other people’s cultures,” Louboutin said as a hypnotic film by New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana — meant to be a wordless biography of the French designer — unfurled scenes of Egypt, Portugal and Bhutan, interspersed with killer shoes. “I would die if I wasn’t nourished by other people’s cultures…. It’s the beginning of tolerance to be open to other civilizations.”
The exhibition that opens Feb. 26 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, smack in Louboutin’s childhood neighborhood, shows how this Art Deco masterpiece ignited his passion for travel, the decorative arts — and shoe design.
Constructed for an exposition in 1931 dedicated to France’s colonial possessions, and then home to a succession of ethnological museums, it currently houses an immigration museum and a tropical aquarium.
You can almost imagine Louboutin at age 10 gazing in awe at the hulking building’s ornamental splendor, its door handles made of jutting horns that evoked the wonder of Africa, and then encountering near the entrance the
“It’s so important to be interested in other people’s cultures,” Louboutin said as a hypnotic film by New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana — meant to be a wordless biography of the French designer — unfurled scenes of Egypt, Portugal and Bhutan, interspersed with killer shoes. “I would die if I wasn’t nourished by other people’s cultures…. It’s the beginning of tolerance to be open to other civilizations.”
The exhibition that opens Feb. 26 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, smack in Louboutin’s childhood neighborhood, shows how this Art Deco masterpiece ignited his passion for travel, the decorative arts — and shoe design.
Constructed for an exposition in 1931 dedicated to France’s colonial possessions, and then home to a succession of ethnological museums, it currently houses an immigration museum and a tropical aquarium.
You can almost imagine Louboutin at age 10 gazing in awe at the hulking building’s ornamental splendor, its door handles made of jutting horns that evoked the wonder of Africa, and then encountering near the entrance the
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