Women's // Suede Ishtar Booty 10mm Ankle Boots // Black (Euro: 35)

Christian Louboutin (1964-) is a French fashion designer whose famously high-end footwear incorporates his signature, shiny red-lacquered soles. Initially a freelance designer for fashion houses, he started his own shoe salon in Paris in 1991, with his shoes finding favor with celebrity clientele. He has partnered with other organizations for creative projects including limited edition pieces, gallery exhibits, and even a custom bar.

He has a fascinating personal history, starting with his childhood in Paris' 12th arrondissement. He said in a 2012 interview that he was "much darker-skinned than everyone else in [his] family. You know, I felt I wasn't French. My family was very French and so I decided they had probably adopted me. But instead of feeling it was terrible and that I was an outsider who had to go and find my real family, I invented my own history, full of characters from Egypt because I was very into the pharaohs." In 2014, at the age of 50, he discovered that his biological father was in fact an Egyptian, with whom his mother had been having a secret affair.

Louboutin was expelled from school three times before the age of 12, when he decided to drop out and run away from home. He began sketching his first designs in his teens, and went through a punk phase that included appearances in several films, and he became a fixture on the Paris party scene, clubbing his nights away alongside Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol.

Today, he splits his time between his home in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, a fisherman's cottage in Lisbon, a palace in Aleppo, a houseboat on the Nile, a house in Luxor, and a 13th-century castle in the Vendée that he shares with his business partner Bruno Chamberlain.