Louboutin told me that he had once become embroiled in a mystery. He had been sitting in his office when the phone rang. It was a police inspector, calling to say that he had found Louboutin’s card in the handbag of a woman who had stabbed a man. The inspector and Louboutin talked for a while. The woman, it turned out, was a prostitute, with a history of insanity. After Louboutin convinced the policeman that he was but a coincidental contact—the card was from one of his boutiques—he put down the receiver and started sketching. “I was trying to imagine exactly the type of shoe the type of girl who would be in that situation would have,” he said. “So I ended up doing a shoe that is, like, a high heel with a point and a detachable sling strap, which can be useful if she wants to knock somebody.” The shoe was gold and strappy. He called it Murderess.

Christian Louboutin is to Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau what Marc Jacobs is to Bleecker Street—the sovereign of an urban fiefdom, expanding in concert with his company’s fortunes. Louboutin opened his first shop at the end of 1991, in the Galérie Vero-Dodat, a skylit arcade that connects Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. The arcade, populated largely by moribund antique shops, was often deserted. Louboutin took a few laps through the area every day, in the hope of creating an illusion of activity. Today, Louboutin has thirty-five stores in sixteen countries. He has annexed half of Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau to comprise what the painter Konstantin Kakanias, a longtime friend, has called “a byzantine labyrinth or, rather, a casbah of offices, design studios, and storage rooms.” Louboutin often administers to the colony from afar: a recent itinerary included stops in Geneva (work), Havana (fun), Miami (fun), and Rio de Janeiro (work and fun), with a few days in Paris before he continued on to Milan, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Shanghai (mostly work). Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a Fleet Street or a Madison Avenue, dedicated to the perfection of a single craft. Employees stream up and down the pavement, identifiable by their extremities. Their soles are like tail-lights: red on the way back.

Décolleté of the shoes: Louboutin’s Lady Lynch shoe. Photograph by Miles Aldridge Photograph by Miles Aldridge

When Louboutin is in town, a festive air prevails. He pops in and out of doorways, dodging buses and darting into shortcuts and passageways—industry as an Advent calendar. In early March, he had just got back from Brazil, where he and Hugo Marchand, his studio director, had gone to work on the summer collection for next year. Louboutin, who is forty-seven, had come to the office straight from the airport. He was wearing brown moleskin pants, a green cardigan sweater, and a plaid shirt with some sort of plant life on the placket. In gold-rimmed spectacles, he appeared the archetypal bootmaker. (He had lost a more fashionable plastic pair in Brazil.) His head, bald and browned, bore a faint pink welt. “The wave jumped on me and banged me!” he said. “I was like an ostrich, my head in the sand.”

Louboutin was sitting in the central room of his design offices, in a two-story building that one enters through a courtyard hidden from the street. The second floor has a peaked glass roof, like a greenhouse. Hanging from the ceiling was a glittering Spanish galleon, accompanied by a pair of chandeliers decked with Disney-like candlesticks. Fashion is still a Post-it Note business, and the pace of work was relaxed. Shoes were strewn all over. Assistants sat at makeshift desks.

Louboutin started his company after working for Charles Jourdan. With Roger Vivier, he curated an exhibit of Vivier’s work. From Vivier—“the Fabergé of footwear,” who invented the comma heel—Louboutin absorbed a sense of artistry. Even now, he thinks of shoes not merely as merchandise but as music. “My favorite sound is definitely mules,” he told me. “If it was an instrument, it’s really ping—the touch of the black keys of the piano.” At Charles Jourdan, Louboutin learned the industrial side of the business. “It was no fantasyland,” he recalled. “It was, like, toughland. I was smelling glue.”

Louboutin began as his company’s only employee. He now employs four hundred and twenty people. He hired a chief operating officer, Alexis Mourot, in 2007, but the enterprise retains an idiosyncratic, human feel. On the official Web site, a little Louboutin figure—a cutout from a vacation snapshot—jumps into the frame, wearing nothing but a bathing suit and a red backpack. Louboutin’s employees, known as Loubi’s Angels, post their favorite songs on the “LouboutinWorld” Twitter feed. The tone of the Louboutin Times, a monthly newsletter, is conspiratorial: a guide to becoming the perfect guest advises, “If your host is tacky (what fun!): hunt down the requirements for a full-on ‘foam party’; a reminder of his/her days in Ibiza.” At the offices, I saw more pens and paintbrushes than keyboards. “I am not producing pills to cure people, so I feel that the whole system should be slightly joyful,” Louboutin told me.

According to Louboutin, Ferragamo tried to hire him years ago, but he relishes his independence. I asked if he ever felt overwhelmed by his success. “I don’t know how to be unhappy,” he replied. He added, merrily, “When I have meetings scheduled so tight that I can’t go to the loo, that’s where I draw the line!”

His office was crammed with souvenirs of his peregrinations: sphinxes, skulls, obelisks, a bright-green wall clock bearing the likeness of a Shia martyr. There was a stack of a hundred and forty-nine Bollywood posters that he had bought in Mumbai, and a Christian Louboutin Cat Burglar Barbie, wearing a black latex catsuit and many-buckled sandals. Czech beads mingled with strands of turquoise from the Tucson Gem Show. (Louboutin’s customers often end up wearing things that might otherwise have made their way to his mantelpiece.) In a kitchenette, a half-eaten panettone sat on the counter. Louboutin had transformed the bathroom into a sort of bulletin board. Taped to the walls were pictures of Queen Elizabeth and Gabby Sidibe, horse-riding sheikhs and the Marlboro Man from Afghanistan, alongside Louboutin’s “Christian L” nametag from Mattel and an article about a poodle groomer.

Louboutin, as a shopper, rivals Elton John. He once bought eight sets of antique wooden doors in Egypt, where he has a house and a dahabiya, a traditional, two-masted sailing cruiser that he christened Dahabibi (“my love boat”). He also has a fisherman’s cottage in Portugal, a palace in Aleppo, and, in the Vendée, a thirteenth-century castle that he shares with Bruno Chamberlain, his longtime business partner. He told me, “I have this disease that if I feel good somewhere I sort of buy a house.”

At the office, Louboutin was inspecting the prototypes for a pair of shoes that he had designed as a birthday gift for the rugby player Gareth Thomas, who announced in 2009 that he is gay. Louboutin was inspired by the story, and the two became friends. (Louboutin has been in a relationship for many years with the landscape designer Louis Benech, but when I asked him if they lived together he smiled and said, “It depends.”) Louboutin put on the prototypes. They were pull-on brown leather loafers, across the vamp of which he had had the seamstresses at the House of Lesage embroider replicas of Thomas’s tattoos (crosses, a scorpion). In July, Louboutin will open a store for men on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He plans to offer the tattoo option to his male customers—“We’ll call it tattoos-to-measure,” he said. After half an hour of test-driving Thomas’s shoes, Louboutin had homed in on a few deficiencies. “I’m seeing too much elastic, so that needs to be redone,” he said, of the part of the shoe, near the instep, that expands and contracts like an accordion. “Also, the leather is too scrunchy,” he said. “See how it scrunches?” He traced some tiny fault lines traversing the front of the shoe. “It should be a drier leather.”

The doorbell buzzed, and a deliveryman appeared, bearing enormous white amaryllises. An assistant signed for them, and presented the flowers to Louboutin. He read the card. “Ah, Victoria,” he said, explaining that he had done the shoes for Victoria Beckham’s runway show. “She is very polite. She’s thanked me twice already.”

A Louboutin shoe begins with a sketch. Louboutin likes to conceive summer collections in warm locales, and winter collections in cold ones. Usually, he and Marchand dream up their thongs and wedges while floating down the Nile, but this year, because of the unrest in Egypt, they relocated to Brazil. “One day or two days, and it starts flowing,” Louboutin said. “Every drawing brings me to another. It’s like a sentence. Or, do you know the game cadavre exquis”—a Surrealist parlor game—“where one sentence builds to another? What is really important is the heat. It’s difficult to think of winter when it’s sunny, so it’s really a big thing for me to have the correct radiation.” In Brazil, Louboutin had been thinking about shells (“not decorative shells, but more like the light of the shell”), nineteen-sixties jewelry (“It’s funny, I always have this handicraft thing”), and the sound of waves (“Being close to the sea made me start drawing”). He had met the architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose undulating work in Brasilia he has long admired. Louboutin recalled a conversation he’d had with Niemeyer: “I said, ‘I’m going to tell you something pretentious, because I do not consider architecture shoes, but we have something in common, which is that we are belonging to the universe of curves.’ ”

Once the sketches are complete, they are sent to the Louboutin factory, outside Milan. A team of artisans works long hours to translate Louboutin’s pen-and-paper fancies into three dimensions. Three weeks later, a set of prototypes will arrive at Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Louboutin’s sketches are like recipes, in that their end products can turn out much sweeter or spicier than he intended. “You have this idea in your head, and then it arrives in, like, electric-blue napa,” Louboutin said. “It’s kind of scary.”

After examining the prototypes, Louboutin and Marchand reconvene. “We go to the castle in the country and look at what works, what doesn’t work,” Marchand said. The basic unit of shoemaking is the last—a sort of mannequin, in the shape of a human foot, upon which the shoe is constructed. For many designs, a new last will need to be made. Other times, Louboutin reinvents a shape he has used before in a new color or a different fabric. The serial nature of his line is an inducement to his customers, who collect the shoes as Yankees fans might caps of different colors. “We think of them as a family,” Marchand told me. “We’ll say, ‘Oh, Bamboo had a baby with Bianca.’ ” (Their spawn is a bright-yellow high heel called Banana.)

Louboutin’s lasts are shorter (from toe to heel), higher (in the arch), and tighter (across the width of the foot) than those of most designers, and their proportions have become even more exaggerated over the years. Elizabeth Semmelhack, of the Bata Shoe Museum, said, “He has sort of upped the ante in terms of how high the heel can soar.” Louboutin is fond of (and famous for) his nude-colored high heels, which extend the figure to superheroic proportions. His best shoes are almost prosthetic, morphing the body—lengthening the legs, defining the calves, lifting the butt—as radically as it is possible to do without surgery. “One thing I detest, I have to say, is when a shoe is too soft, and it’s molding to the foot,” Louboutin said. “This is quite disgusting. And I really, really hate incredibly long shoes, where the last is very pointy, almost like Aladdin.”

The shoes that Louboutin sells in stores are made at his factory in Italy. But he maintains a small atelier on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a sort of Santa’s workshop from which he can cater to the whims of his private clients. Their requests range from the quotidian (extra padding, special sizes) to the more outlandish (red-soled booties for a baby, high heels for a man). “It’s very much a laboratory,” Louboutin said. “It’s super-interesting for me, because I can try new things.”

One day, I wandered into the atelier. Waxy lasts in red and pink and yellow hung from rods, like nautical buoys. They bore names such as Janet Jackson, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Prince—a Madame Tussauds of the feet. Nearby, a shelf overflowed with rows of light-brown shoeboxes. They had been labelled in black Magic Marker: Melle Alba, La Falaise, Arielle, Daphne. (The last two names refer to Arielle Dombasle, the lounge singer, and to Daphne Guinness, the beer heiress—the wife and the mistress, respectively, of the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.) A man in an apron was sitting on a low stool, affixing leather to a last with copper nails. Every once in a while, he dipped a wooden stick into a gluepot he had fashioned from an empty confiture jar.

The base price for a custom-made pair of Louboutins is four thousand dollars. “After that, if the style already exists it’s regular price plus thirty per cent,” Louboutin explained. “If it’s completely completely crazy or unusual, I make an estimate.” The one thing Louboutin does not tweak is the color of the sole, even though charities are always hounding him to do a pink one for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or a green one for Earth Day. Shawna Rose told me, “I don’t even torture him with it anymore.”

Louboutin hit upon the red-soles gambit in 1993, his third year in business. Things weren’t going especially well—after a promising first season, Louboutin, naïve about the timetables of manufacturing and delivery, had not got his second collection of shoes into the store until weeks too late. “I completely missed the season,” Louboutin recalled. “Bruno, being so protective, didn’t even let me know we were losing money.”

Louboutin had thought of making a shoe inspired by Andy Warhol’s “Flowers.” The prototype, a pink stacked heel with a cartoonish cloth blossom, had arrived from Italy. “I was very happy, because it was similar to the drawing,” Louboutin recalled, “but the drawing still was stronger and I could not understand why.” Louboutin continued, “There was this big black sole, and then, thank God, there was this girl painting her nails at the time.” Louboutin grabbed the nail polish—it was red—from the assistant and slathered it on the sole of the prototype. “Then it popped,” he recalled, “and I thought, This is the drawing!” Part of the genius of the red sole is that it is beautiful. The other part is that it requires a lot of refreshing: Louboutins, which look horrible scuffed, start to depreciate the day you walk them off the lot. One day, Louboutin was in London, when a gust of wind came along and lifted the long black abayas of a trio of women in front of him—all of them shod in red. “That was my favorite!” he recalled. Louboutin says that, even during the recession, when Net-A-Porter resorted to wrapping packages in butcher paper, and Hermès to offering plain white bags, no one requested a muted Louboutin.