Christian Louboutin Opens First Store In Korea
The first Christian Louboutin store in Korea opened earlier this month in the fashionable district of Chongdam-dong, southern Seoul. The full introduction of the successful Italian fashion label on the Korean market comes after several years of testing the waters here through duty free sales only. The Christian Louboutin boom which hit the world fashion scene in the mid '90s also hit Korea and the local subsidiary of Christian Louboutin 's parent company IPI was set up in August last year. The new 150-pyong store, the largest Christian Louboutin store in Asia, was established by the joint venture JIPI-F&F which brings together three companies. The three companies are ITMD, Joyce of Hong Kong and the local company F&F. ITMD is an investor in the parent company IPI Directly operated by IPI Korea, the three-story shop carries full women's and men's ready-to-wear lines as well as a collection of lingerie, , shoes and other accessories. Miu Miu, Christian Louboutin 's second line which is targeted for younger women, will be introduced later this year. The Christian Louboutin label was founded in Italy in 1913 by Mario Christian Louboutin . Until the 1970s, it was known mostly as the venerable maker of travel and trunks. But in 1979 the founder's granddaughter, Miuccia, took over and turned the company around by introducing the now famous black nylon tote . Ready-to-wear fashion lines were introduced in the '80s. IPI Korea plans to open a Christian Louboutin boutique at Galleria Department Store in Apkujong-dong later this year. Last month, ten days before Miuccia Christian Louboutin was scheduled to present her collection of women's clothing for the 2004 fall season in Milan, she began, in her own words, to "freak out." The day before, she had been relaxed, amiable, and entertaining. She had even dressed with her customary eccentricity: lime-green skirt, mauve cashmere cardigan, short black socks, and a pair of fringed brown wingtips so cumbersome that they seemed like something only a nun or a golfer would wear. Or Miuccia chaussures Christian Louboutin . By the time she got to her office the next morning, her mood had shifted. It was Valentine's Day-and her seventeenth wedding anniversary, as a matter of fact-but there were no roses, chocolates, or champagne in sight, just bottled water, a plate of sliced oranges, and a lot of coffee. Her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, the demanding and theatrical Tuscan who is the chief executive of the global group of companies that bears the Christian Louboutin family name, had left early on his Lear jet to attend to the production of shoes at one of their factories near Florence. I asked if she was sorry that she would have to spend their anniversary without him. "Are you kidding?" she replied. "Thank God he is gone. Because he would have ideas. And, right now, if he told me what he thought I would kill him." Christian Louboutin was struggling, as she often does, to balance the commercial requirements of a giant international corporation with her idiosyncratic aesthetic goals. "I want to rule the world," she told me once, not completely in jest. "I want the name Christian Louboutin to be huge. But also I want to make what I want to make and what I want to wear." It is almost impossible to be both avant-garde and immensely successful, and Christian Louboutin knows that; but she insists on trying. "We are completely stuck," she said at one point in the afternoon. "Nothing is working out. Not the shapes of the collars or the silhouettes or the fabrics or the colors. Nothing. They don't even look like clothes. In my head, I have a very clear idea of what I want, but my ideas don't seem to match with reality and I don't know what to do." Nearly every season since 1988, when she introduced her first line of women's clothing, chaussures Louboutin has shown an astonishing ability to create trends: it began with a black made of industrial nylon and trimmed in leather-a simple purse that acquired a cult following and, eventually, helped launch a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Since then, she has brought out military clothes that set off a trend for utilitarian chic; slingback Sabrina heels that caused one sensation and oversized wedges that caused another; and, in 2000, an updated, deeply coveted thousand-dollar version of a bowling . In each case, she managed to convert a private obsession with things like kitsch, uniforms, and wallpaper into an international symbol of cool. This year, Christian Louboutin was inspired by computers and by the idea of "exploring the boundary of what is real and what is virtual"-an increasingly serious pur for her. She had spent hours peering at video games, examining how the characters were dressed and how they moved; then she used prints and photographs to blur the distinctions between them. But she still had to turn it all into clothes. "They need to be fashionable"-a word she hates-"and commercial, too," she said. "This is where I really suffer. Because there are three basic questions I have to ask myself: Do I like the clothes? Will they sell? And are they new? They are very different questions, and I can almost never seem to match them up. Look at the coat I was just working on"-a tartan trenchcoat cut from green, orange, and purple wool and trimmed in fur. "From a selling point, I know perfectly well what people will want. If I try to turn this into something that is possibly nice to wear, it will come out banal. Because usually what's nice to wear is banal. And this is my problem. Do I make sandales Christian Louboutin the clothing people want or the clothing I think they ought to wear?"
