christian louboutin cruise

Shoe Designer Christian Louboutin Is Now A Billionaire

How the famed french cobbler turned his signature red soles—worn by beyoncé, taylor swift and anyone who can afford them—into serious gold..

By Giacomo Tognini , Forbes Staff

A fter four decades of keeping his well-heeled clients in his iconic red-soled heels, shoe designer Christian Louboutin is now a billionaire. The 61-year-old designer is stepping into the billionaire ranks thanks to his eponymous fashion brand. While still best-known for its towering stilettos and perilous platforms, the Louboutin brand has expanded into sneakers, bags, and beauty products, as well as lines for men and children.

The company was valued at $3.2 billion last year by Exor, the investment company of Italy’s Agnelli family, which bought a 24% stake in 2021 for about $650 million. Louboutin still owns 35%—which Forbes values at $1.1 billion. That stake makes up most of an estimated $1.2 billion fortune that includes other investments such as the Vermelho Hotel, a luxury resort he opened in southern Portugal last year. Representatives for Louboutin didn’t respond to requests for a comment on the valuation.

“I started the company with my two best friends,” Louboutin said in a 2021 interview with The Business Of Fashion . “I never thought of selling a part of the company. I never thought of anything else other than designing pretty shoes.”

These Boots Were Made for Working: Louboutin designed different shoes and boots for every era of Taylor Swift's tour.

Those pretty shoes—which start at about $800 a pair and can quickly reach into the mid-thousands—soon found their way to the feet of the world’s most beautiful people. Louboutin opened his first Paris boutique in 1991 and one of his first celebrity customers was Princess Caroline of Monaco. Since then, his red soles have become a fixture on the red carpet. At this year’s Golden Globes, his shoes were worn by an eclectic range of stars, including Selena Gomez, Lenny Kravitz, Heidi Klum and Simu Liu.

They have also become pop culture touchstones. On Sex and the City , Sarah Jessica Parker’s heel-addicted Carrie Bradshaw famously wore mismatched Loubis and started a trend. And Cardi B immortalized his heels in her 2017 breakout hit “Bodak Yellow.” (“These expensive, these is red bottoms, these is bloody shoes.”)

Last year, both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift wore Louboutins during their respective concert tours—he designed a different shoe for each Swift era: loafers for Red , knee-high boots encrusted in rhinestones for Midnights —and Margot Robbie wore a pair of his metallic mules to the London Premiere of Barbie . Despite the sea of pink, the soles of her shoes remained Louboutin red, which has its own Pantone code: 18-1663TP.

B orn and raised in Paris, Louboutin came from a working-class background. His father was a cabinet maker from Brittany, while his mother stayed home raising him and three older sisters. (Many years later, at 51, he discovered that his father was actually an Egyptian man his mother had met in her early 40s.) When he was 10, Louboutin visited Paris’ Museum of African and Oceanic Art and saw a sign that forbade women from wearing stilettos. That didn’t sit right with the young Louboutin, kickstarting a lifelong obsession with shoes.

Best Feet Forward: Celebrities—including Rihanna, Oprah, Katy Perry and Beyoncé—love kicking up their Louboutin heels.

“I was born into a very feminine environment with my sisters, who helped me to understand women and definitely led me to what I’m doing,” he told Forbes in 2016. “I always used to draw shoes growing up but, frankly, I never thought creating new shoes could be a profession.”

At 16, he was expelled from school and traveled to India before returning to Paris to intern at the Folies Bergère, where he began designing shoes for the dancers. Then came a stint with French shoe designer Charles Jourdan, followed by freelance work for Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. In 1988, he was hired by Roger Vivier, best known for inventing the stiletto in the 1950s.

“When I was about 16, someone gave me a book on the footwear designer Roger Vivier with a beautiful golden cover,” Louboutin told Forbes in 2016. “I thought, How amazing—it really is a career. You can make a living designing shoes!”

He then took a brief hiatus from footwear—designing terraces in New York and gardens in France—before opening his first shop in Paris in 1991 with the help of two friends, Henri Seydoux and Bruno Chambelland. (Seydoux sold his stake in the 2021 deal with Exor.)

The famous red soles came to him in 1992, when he was disappointed by a shoe prototype in his atelier and saw that his assistant was polishing her nails. “It took me a while to figure out it was because the sole was black,” Louboutin told Forbes in 2016. “I grabbed my assistant’s nail polish and painted the soles red.”

From his first boutique in the Galerie Véro-Dodat, a 19th-century neoclassical shopping arcade a short walk away from the Louvre, the brand continued to grow, opening boutiques in New York in 1994 and London in 1997. Over the next decade, Louboutin’s heels would be spotted everywhere from Princess Diana’s funeral to Madonna’s music videos. He trademarked the red sole in France in 2000, and three years later he started selling bags, followed by men’s shoes in 2009.

Today, Louboutin has more than 160 boutiques in 32 countries across 4 continents, including 35 in the United States, 23 in Japan and 20 in China. “Louboutin is a rare example of a footwear brand which is seemingly able to expand into other product categories, including apparel and handbags,” says Luca Solca, senior research analyst for luxury goods at Bernstein.

Over the years, his company has aggressively protected its red sole in numerous lawsuits around the world. That led to clashes with industry titans in lawsuits against Zara (owned by billionaire Amancio Ortega ’s Inditex)—which it lost—and with Yves Saint Laurent (part of Bernard Arnault ’s luxury conglomerate LVMH) which it partly won. Last year, Louboutin won trademark cases in Brazil and India and filed a lawsuit alongside tech giant Meta against a Mexican counterfeiter selling fake Louboutins on Facebook and Instagram.

His personal real estate portfolio also spans the globe. He owns an expansive apartment with red mahogany floors near the Opéra Garnier in Paris; a house with a sailboat in Luxor, Egypt; apartments in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro; a 17th-century home in Aleppo, Syria, that was damaged in the civil war; a 350-acre compound in Melides, Portugal, near his hotel; and a 7-bedroom villa in Lisbon and the 13th-century Château de Champgillon in the French countryside (where he reportedly keeps a collection of 8,000 shoes), both co-owned with Chambelland.

Even as he’s moved beyond heels into sneakers and makeup, Louboutin himself remains essential to the brand’s success. He designs the autumn and winter collections at his French château or in Portugal, and works on the spring and summer collections in Egypt or Brazil. The sketches are then manufactured into shoes at factories in Italy and Spain.

“I first draw. I start sketching with a pen. I isolate myself for at least two weeks and draw,” Louboutin told Forbes in 2016. “When it’s a winter collection, I go somewhere cold, and for summer, I go somewhere warm. I’m receptive to the light and heat.”

Hamming It Up: Miss Piggy wore Louboutins to sit on Jimmy Fallon's couch in 2011.

The company produces more than 1 million pairs of shoes a year and as with many luxury fashion brands, the high prices are key to its staying power. “The financial markets like luxury companies because they have higher margins, high returns on capital and high pricing power,” says Joren van Aken, an analyst at Belgian investment bank Degroof Petercam. “After all, wealthy people will not stop buying luxury items whether inflation is 2% or 5%.”

After posting record profits during the pandemic, the luxury goods industry saw slower growth in 2023. Shoes were the slowest-growing luxury category last year, expanding by only 2% to 3%, according to Bain & Company. That’s impacted Louboutin, too. The firm recorded net profits of $37 million in the first half of 2023, down 51% from the same period in 2022, amid raw material shortages and slow growth in China. Still, the company added 10 boutiques and “continued to deliver top tier profitability,” per Exor’s 2023 half-year report.

Not that Louboutin is ready to put his feet up just yet. In February, his brand announced a new line of sunglasses with Italian eyewear maker Marcolin. And last week, he designed a glittery, disco-themed Bal de la Rose charity gala for his old friend Princess Caroline in Monaco, replete with 59 mirror balls, a performance by Gloria Gaynor, and heels—lots and lots of heels.

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Equipped with ice-breaking technology, these huge fancy yachts are the only river cruisers running all year around. The round trip journey takes two and a half hours and floats past all the big sights like the White House, Novodevichy monastery and the Kremlin. There’s a large open air observation deck up top, while the main body of the ship houses a restaurant with a dance floor for a romantic post dinner dance. For a particularly romantic experience take one of the evening boats and admire the bright lights of the city skyline at night.

The most relaxing and picturesque tour that Moscow can offer: a great way to see the city center and its main attractions. This is a perfect alternative to exploring the city by car, if you only have time to do sightseeing during weekday rush hours.

Your English-speaking guide is eager to share every bit of their knowledge about the surrounding landscape, the architecture and historical details.

We conduct Moscow river tour on Radisson Flotilla boats all year around!  It’s warm inside during winter months, while there’s air conditioning during hot summer days. You may also treat yourself to drinks, lunch or dinner on board (drinks and food are not included in tour price).

The cost of an excursion with a personal guide for 1 person

Quay at Radisson Collection Hotel

Government Headquarters ("the White House")

Kievsky Railway Central

Novodevichy Convent

Luzhniki Stadium

Academy of Sciences

Monument to Peter I

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

Moscow Kremlin

St.Basil's Cathedral

Novospassky Monastery

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Cruising the Moskva River: A short guide to boat trips in Russia’s capital

There’s hardly a better way to absorb Moscow’s atmosphere than on a ship sailing up and down the Moskva River. While complicated ticketing, loud music and chilling winds might dampen the anticipated fun, this checklist will help you to enjoy the scenic views and not fall into common tourist traps.

How to find the right boat?

There are plenty of boats and selecting the right one might be challenging. The size of the boat should be your main criteria.

Plenty of small boats cruise the Moskva River, and the most vivid one is this yellow Lay’s-branded boat. Everyone who has ever visited Moscow probably has seen it.

This option might leave a passenger disembarking partially deaf as the merciless Russian pop music blasts onboard. A free spirit, however, will find partying on such a vessel to be an unforgettable and authentic experience that’s almost a metaphor for life in modern Russia: too loud, and sometimes too welcoming. Tickets start at $13 (800 rubles) per person.

Bigger boats offer smoother sailing and tend to attract foreign visitors because of their distinct Soviet aura. Indeed, many of the older vessels must have seen better days. They are still afloat, however, and getting aboard is a unique ‘cultural’ experience. Sometimes the crew might offer lunch or dinner to passengers, but this option must be purchased with the ticket. Here is one such  option  offering dinner for $24 (1,490 rubles).

If you want to travel in style, consider Flotilla Radisson. These large, modern vessels are quite posh, with a cozy restaurant and an attentive crew at your service. Even though the selection of wines and food is modest, these vessels are still much better than other boats.

Surprisingly, the luxurious boats are priced rather modestly, and a single ticket goes for $17-$32 (1,100-2,000 rubles); also expect a reasonable restaurant bill on top.

How to buy tickets?

Women holding photos of ships promise huge discounts to “the young and beautiful,” and give personal invitations for river tours. They sound and look nice, but there’s a small catch: their ticket prices are usually more than those purchased online.

“We bought tickets from street hawkers for 900 rubles each, only to later discover that the other passengers bought their tickets twice as cheap!”  wrote  (in Russian) a disappointed Rostislav on a travel company website.

Nevertheless, buying from street hawkers has one considerable advantage: they personally escort you to the vessel so that you don’t waste time looking for the boat on your own.

Prices start at $13 (800 rubles) for one ride, and for an additional $6.5 (400 rubles) you can purchase an unlimited number of tours on the same boat on any given day.

Flotilla Radisson has official ticket offices at Gorky Park and Hotel Ukraine, but they’re often sold out.

Buying online is an option that might save some cash. Websites such as  this   offer considerable discounts for tickets sold online. On a busy Friday night an online purchase might be the only chance to get a ticket on a Flotilla Radisson boat.

This  website  (in Russian) offers multiple options for short river cruises in and around the city center, including offbeat options such as ‘disco cruises’ and ‘children cruises.’ This other  website  sells tickets online, but doesn’t have an English version. The interface is intuitive, however.

Buying tickets online has its bad points, however. The most common is confusing which pier you should go to and missing your river tour.

“I once bought tickets online to save with the discount that the website offered,” said Igor Shvarkin from Moscow. “The pier was initially marked as ‘Park Kultury,’ but when I arrived it wasn’t easy to find my boat because there were too many there. My guests had to walk a considerable distance before I finally found the vessel that accepted my tickets purchased online,” said the man.

There are two main boarding piers in the city center:  Hotel Ukraine  and  Park Kultury . Always take note of your particular berth when buying tickets online.

Where to sit onboard?

Even on a warm day, the headwind might be chilly for passengers on deck. Make sure you have warm clothes, or that the crew has blankets ready upon request.

The glass-encased hold makes the tour much more comfortable, but not at the expense of having an enjoyable experience.

Getting off the boat requires preparation as well. Ideally, you should be able to disembark on any pier along the way. In reality, passengers never know where the boat’s captain will make the next stop. Street hawkers often tell passengers in advance where they’ll be able to disembark. If you buy tickets online then you’ll have to research it yourself.

There’s a chance that the captain won’t make any stops at all and will take you back to where the tour began, which is the case with Flotilla Radisson. The safest option is to automatically expect that you’ll return to the pier where you started.

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Pro-Slavery, Pro-Rape Cult-like Church Takes Over Idaho College Town

In most regards, Moscow, Idaho, is the embodiment of the bucolic college town: tree-covered neighborhoods, quiet streets, quaint shops downtown, and a pretty University of Idaho college campus. But for people who live there, the insidious presence of Pastor Doug Wilson’s cult-like Christ Church—not at all obvious on the surface, but cumulatively overwhelming at times—can make life on the Palouse surreal, even nightmarish.

Moreover, as a deep profile by Sarah Stankorb at Vice reveals, Wilson’s domineering evangelical church—which buys up property and businesses throughout the Latah County community and bullies both members and non-members who question either his edicts or his far-right theology—is built on a fundamentally misogynist worldview that permits male members to rape their wives, and threatens any women who object.

Stankorb’s report details the stories of the women who have survived Christ Church’s “culture that normalizes sexual abuse and harassing survivors.” One described being raped repeatedly by her husband, then becoming an outcast when she divorced him. Others describe being sexually abused as teenagers by men who taught in the church’s schools.

This ethos within the church is a direct outgrowth of the theology that Wilson teaches. He asserts that husbands have complete spiritual responsibility for the household, which includes preventing the wife from failing to submit to his will in “spending habits, television viewing habits, weight, rejection of his leadership, laziness in cleaning the house, lack of responsiveness to sexual advances.”

Wilson contends that modern society has stripped men of their intended roles, including their sexual mores. He has written that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”; instead, “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” while a “woman receives, surrenders, accepts,” he argues. He concludes that “true authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”

Despite its location in a remote rural college town, Christ Church is not merely a fringe cult. Wilson is a major figure in the evangelical home-schooling and “classical Christian school” movements, having helped found the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which accredits institutions similar to Wilson’s. He also operates a publishing house, Logos Books, that provides curriculum materials for both homeschoolers and “classical schools.”

Its current expansion plans in Moscow include a new complex for Logos School, built on 30 acres of land on the town’s northwestern perimeter. A fundraising video reminds viewers “that much of what we are doing in education […] is exported to hundreds of classical Christian schools across the country and beyond.”

Much of what Wilson teaches has long been controversial. In 2004, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok exposed both his church’s cult-like creeping takeover of Moscow, as well as the far-right Dominionist beliefs embedded in his school literature, including a defense of the Confederacy and slavery.

Wilson co-wrote a book, Southern Slavery: As It Was, featured in the Logos Books curriculum, which claimed in part: "Slavery as it existed in the South [...] was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.”

It argued: "There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. [...] "Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care."

At a 2003 public forum in Moscow, Wilson attempted to defend the book , claiming it had been misinterpreted. "My defense of the South does not make me a racist," he said. "I am not interested in defending slavery. I don't believe we should practice slavery.

“What I said is that a Christian man in the South could be a slave owner. He needed to follow the rules in the New Testament. Christian slave owners were compelled to teach their slaves to read [and] teach them Christian values. When there is a chance for freedom, the Bible tells the slaves to take it. Paul lays out the peaceful end to slavery. That is not how Southern slavery ended in the United States."

Wilson has taken other racially incendiary positions. In 2013 , he denounced pastors who voted for Barack Obama as unfit for the pulpit.

“Any evangelical leader—by which I mean someone like a minister or an elder—who voted for Obama the second time, is not qualified for the office he holds, and should resign that office,” Wilson wrote. “Unless and until he repents of how he is thinking about the challenges confronting our nation, he should not be entrusted with the care of souls.”

Moreover, Wilson wrote, Black pastors were especially corrupt in backing Obama: “Not only must the dignity of human life be upheld by white and black Christian leaders alike, to the extent we may allow any differences, it should be to expect a greater vehemence in opposing abortion (in the person of its advocates and enablers) from black leaders,” he opined. “This is because it is their people who are being disproportionately targeted by the white Sangerites. And a black Christian leader who cannot identify a Sangerite is a rabbit leader who does not know what a hawk looks like.”

In recent years, he has heightened his “traditionalist” attacks on modern mores, including a 2020 speech he gave on the UI campus titled “The Lost Virtue of Sexism,” in which he argued that everyone can agree the Bible is sexist—but that the Bible is always right. In the speech, he denounced the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira as “a skankfest,” adding: “You might think that women are being elevated by an activity that I would regard as degrading.”

Wilson’s church has also played a leading role in Moscow-area protests against COVID-19 health measures, including mask mandates. Three church members arrested in one of those protests, including Christ Church deacon Gabriel Rench, filed a federal lawsuit in March against Moscow city officials over their arrests at a September 2020 event.

As the home of a liberal-arts college, Moscow has long been viewed statewide as a hotbed of leftist politics, and its voting record has remained predominantly Democratic in most elections, including in 2020, when Latah County was one of Idaho’s few counties to vote for Joe Biden.

This, in fact, is the situation that Wilson has long intended to change. He calls his plans for Moscow a “spiritual takeover.”

“Basically this is a blue dot in a very, very red state and the blue dotters are pleased,” Wilson told Religion News Service in an interview. “Our mission is ‘All of Christ for all of life’ and if you drill that down, then for all of Moscow.”

Local residents have begun organizing a kind of underground resistance to Wilson’s takeover, reflected in the website The Truth About Moscow , which tracks all of Christ Church’s operations in the town. Other residents have begun speaking out in local forums.

“Christ Church’s goal promotes division and excludes our many friends of whatever faiths including Jewish, Muslim, atheists or anyone besides Christians, as defined by Christ Church. Moscow should not be defined by any religion and certainly not owned nor controlled by any church,” Moscow resident Linda Pike opined in a recent Moscow-Pullman Daily News letter to the editor.

Wilson himself sees no room for compromise, foreshadowing the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection in a 2019 interview opining that the cultural war in Moscow reflected what was happening nationally. The country, he said, seems to be in a “slow-motion civil war with no bullets.”

“The only possible solution is a massive religious revival,” he said. “Short of that and we’re headed for trouble.”

Published with permission from Daily Kos .

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