An exhibition celebrating the red soles and design genius of Christian Louboutin, who launched his career aged 12 by hanging around stage doors in Paris and taking an internship at the Folies Bergère aged 16, will be mounted at the Design Museum in London next year.
Curator Donna Loveday, who after some agonising wore flat pumps to meet the master at his Paris studio, instead of the teetering high heels for which he is famous, described him as "a magician". His most famous clients include Madonna and Victoria Beckham, and the exhibition will feature the burlesque artist Dita Von Teese, another devoted customer, in recognition of the influence of showgirls on his work.
The exhibition will also feature trapezes, though the designers are still trying to work out how and where: Louboutin loves them, and has two in his studio on which he regularly practices. The exhibition, opening in March, will mark the 20th anniversary of his first small store in Paris in 1992. They are now all over the world, including three in Moscow.
Loveday said Louboutin has 3,000 women who each own 500 pairs on his customer books, and one who owns more than 6,000 pairs. "I do know who she is, but I'm not allowed to say.
(As a price check, there's currently a pair on eBay, second-hand but in their original box, for a cent under $500, shipping extra).
Louboutin left school with no qualifications but, during his time at the Folies, where he made tea and stitched on buttons and feathers, he used to present the showgirls with his drawings of personalised fantasy shoes.
He spent a period as a garden designer before returning to shoes and launching the brand. The distinctive glossy red soles made them instantly recognisable on the streets or catwalks, and earlier this year he filed a $1m lawsuit against Yves Saint Laurent in the US for launching a red-soled shoe. The rival firm argued that red soles date at least as far back as Louis XIV in the 1600s via Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. A judgment is expected soon.
Louboutin has insisted that the purpose of his towering high heels is to make "women feel confident and empowered", but he has created shoes that even he admits are unwearable, some of which will feature in the show.
In 2007, he collaborated with the film-maker David Lynch on Fetish, an exhibition of his shoes in Lynch's photographs as erotic sculptural objects including ballet pumps made vertical by an impossible heel, or shoes with heels projecting inches beyond the sole.
The next major exhibition at the Design Museum, opening in November, will be on the work of its co-founder, Sir Terence Conran, to mark his 80th birthday. It will also be mounting an exhibition on sport and design to coincide with the Olympics. At the launch, the Olympic gold medal-winning oarsmen Mark Hunter and Zac Purchase said ruefully that in their sport at least, the mark of any really innovative piece of new design is that it gets banned very quickly.
• Christian Louboutin, Design Museum London, 28 March-July 2012
