Christian Louboutin is reclining on a red velvet banquette in the Crazy Horse Saloon, a Parisian cabaret club near the banks of the Seine. The Frenchman is the most famous shoe designer in the world; a household name thanks to his towering red-soled heels, which adorn the feet of the world's most glamorous women. So why is he getting so fired up about cleavage?
"For me, I like low, low, low cleavage," he says in a French accent as thick as mayonnaise. "It is so pretty."
![Christian Louboutin with Crazy Horse dancers Hippy Bang Bang (left) and Lolita Kiss-Curl.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725060816im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/4/w/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxcvvy.png/1500624046760.jpg)
Sensing my confusion, he asks an assistant to bring him one of his shoes, a glossy sculpted object with a vertiginous heel. "This is the third cleavage," he says, running a finger along the part of the shoe where the toes are partially exposed. "The first cleavage is here [he taps his chest] and the second is the crack of the azz."
His salt-and-pepper beard splits into a grin. "Maybe there is a fourth cleavage. I don't know."
![Backstage at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725060816im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/f/y/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxcvvy.png/1500624046760.jpg)
Louboutin, 54, is recalling his first attempt to design a shoe for the Crazy Horse Saloon's dancers – aka the Crazy Girls – a company of 20 young women who go by stage names such as Lolita Kiss-Curl and Hippy Bang Bang. They perform two shows a night, frequently topless and occasionally naked, but never without a killer set of heels.
True to his instincts, Louboutin made the dancers an elegant pump. It had a five-inch heel and cleavage – the third kind – revealing lots of toe. It was "very, very pretty", he says wistfully. Unfortunately, a fatal flaw emerged when the classically trained dancers began kicking their legs and pointing their toes; the shoes flew across the room like missiles. On the Crazy Horse Saloon's tiny stage – the club's low ceilings and modest proportions betray its origins as a series of interconnected wine cellars – the risk of performers being knocked unconscious by a high couture projectile was clear and present.
"It was a mistake," he shrugs. "But that is why working with showgirls is really the best school for a shoe designer."
Louboutin had long dreamed of designing shoes for the stage. At the age of 18, after a childhood that saw him expelled from several schools due to lack of focus and a tendency to play the class clown, he began an internship at another Parisian cabaret institution, the Folies Bergere. He was a dogsbody who spent most of his time adjusting seams and passing the dancers billet-doux written by lovestruck stagehands. But he also studied the showgirls, how they moved, how they used their feet. "For those girls shoes were a weapon – a weapon they used every night."
![Crazy Horse dancer Lolita Kiss-Curl.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725060816im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/4/w/h/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxcvvy.png/1500624046760.jpg)
He left the Folies Bergere before making his name as a designer, so a 2012 invitation to become the Crazy Horse Saloon's first guest creator was too good to pass up. Louboutin devised four new acts, combining them with classic Crazy Horse repertoire in a show called Feu. He also fulfilled his dream of designing a shoe for showgirls by creating six bespoke sets of heels for each dancer. When the Crazy Girls perform numbers such as Teasing, Striptease-Moi or the show's regular opening act, God Save our Bareskin – a parade ground routine featuring a memorable nine-bum salute – they do so in the kind of exotic red-soled footwear favoured by the likes of Rihanna, Beyonce and Melania Trump.
Is it difficult dancing in five-inch heels? "You know what? It depends," he says. "Classical ballet dancers – and most of the Crazy Girls are classically trained – don't find it that difficult because the arches of their feet are naturally super high. Here [at the Crazy Horse] we even did 5.5 inches. You can't run but, then again, you don't run much at the Crazy Horse."
![Christian Louboutin says working with showgirls is good training for a shoe designer.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725060816im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/e/4/w/g/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxcvvy.png/1500624046760.jpg)
The Saloon is part of a well-established Parisian cabaret scene. The Moulin Rouge and Le Lido are bigger and better known, but they're more conventional too. Neither offers the intimate, intense experience delivered by the Crazy Horse's Gallic cocktail of high camp, high fashion and teasing sexuality; a demimonde where barely clad dancers bathed in kaleidoscopic light dance and mime to music ranging from hip-hop to chanson.
The spectacle presented twice a night on the compact stage beneath 12 Avenue George V could best be described as burlesque, a form of entertainment that flourished in the early 20th century – in America, in particular – before devolving into coarser forms of striptease. But this is burlesque with a unique Gallic stamp. Andree Deissenberg, the chief creative officer who took the reins in 2006 and was responsible for getting Louboutin to work with the company, admits it is difficult to categorise. "It's a true aesthetic experience," she says. "It's a fashion magazine, an art exhibition, a walk through a museum. But it's also champagne and laughter. It's beautiful, entertaining, iconic and it pleases both men and women."
Working with showgirls is really the best school for a shoe designer.
Christian Louboutin
The Crazy Horse Saloon first opened its doors in 1951. Its founder, a shopkeeper's son called Alain Bernardin, was engaged to a singer and needed a venue to showcase her talents. He borrowed the name of a Native American chief, dressed his waiters in check shirts and hired a country-and-western band. The first incarnation of the Saloon closed in 1953, but it re-opened soon after when Bernardin, inspired by a movie about the Los Angeles burlesque scene, sensed an opportunity.
The first star of the revamped club was Miss Fortunia, a 20-year-old from Haiti who stripped down to her G-string to general acclaim. Bernardin's commercial instincts were spot on – "I understood the body of a woman would make my fortune," he once said – but he was equally fascinated by fashion, art and design. Inspired by the key aesthetic movements of his times – surrealism and dada, in particular – he projected colours and abstract designs onto the bare flesh of his dancers. Artists including Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp became friends and occasional collaborators; a who's-who of musicians and actors including Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor followed in their wake.
![The Crazy Horse Saloon was founded in 1951 by a shopkeeper's son called Alain Bernardin (right).](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725060816im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/f/y/w/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxcvvy.png/1500624046760.jpg)
The glory days didn't last. Times changed and the club's popularity waned. Bernardin was found shot dead in his office in 1994, an apparent suicide. His adult children took over the club, but the weight of their father's legacy seemed to stymie change. "It was going downhill basically," recalls Deissenberg who was brought on board after the club was sold in 2005. "The audiences were much older and it was going to die along with its audience. It needed to be brought back to life with some investment and some energy."
Deissenberg, whose pre-Crazy Horse career was spent at Cirque du Soleil, lavished £2 million on the club's sound and light systems. More importantly perhaps, she expanded its vision. The celebrated French lingerie designer Fifi Chachnil created new (extremely small) costumes and Philippe Decoufle – who choreographed the video for New Order's True Faith among other things – directed a new show called Desirs. It includes a routine inspired by the global financial crisis, in which a harried blonde executive pounds her desk in frustration before removing her glasses and most of her clothes.
![Dita Von Teese performs with the Crazy Horse dancers.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725060816im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/f/y/g/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxcvvy.png/1500624046760.jpg)
Deissenberg invited high-profile guests to appear at the club. The first was Dita Von Teese, the American performer often credited with re-popularising burlesque. The Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst [aka Tom Neuwirth] and the former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson were more controversial additions. The latter disrobed on top of a Harley Davidson to a tune written by French music's great reprobate, Serge Gainsbourg. For a handful of traditionalists, the decision to let a man and a surgically enhanced woman appear on the Saloon's sacred stage was an outrage.
Deissenberg is unrepentant. "For me Conchita Wurst is an exciting artist and we're a house of artists," she says. Besides, the new approach – which includes a touring version of the show, Forever Crazy, which is coming to Sydney in September – is working. The audiences are bigger, younger and more diverse. "We get a lot more women now, says Deissenberg. "The show is empowering and speaks to women. Lots of couples come, but we also get groups of 20 women, girlfriends who want to put on their heels and have a good time."
The night I saw the show, the audience was certainly mixed and boisterous too. A group of awestruck Japanese tourists sat next to a table of fashionable young Parisians – men and women – who whooped at the climax of each routine; well-dressed couples held hands and smiled as the spectacle unfolded.
The high proportion of women who come to see the show suggests that Louboutin's description of it as "a modern and dreamlike conceptualisation, celebrating women in honour of women" is more than hyperbole. Deissenberg says is rarely accused of objectifying or exploiting women and when she is, it is usually by people who haven't been to the Saloon.
In truth, the show is not really about sex. The kinetic coloured lights cover as much as they reveal, distracting the eye, blurring the line between flesh and fabric. It's a technique once described as the subtle art of frustration. "Is there anything more gorgeous than that?" says Deissenberg. "Flirting is the art of frustration: I'm there, I'm not there, I give, I don't give. Isn't the prelude the most exciting moment? It's not about being there, it's about getting there."
From the dancers' point of view, the art of frustration requires hard work. Just becoming a Crazy Girl is difficult enough: hundreds apply, few are chosen. The club's low ceiling – the stage is only two metres high – and Louboutin's elevated heels means successful candidates must be at least 1.68 metres tall, but under 1.73 metres. There are ideal proportions for legs and torsos, too, and an optimum measurement – 21 centimetres – for the distance between a dancer's nipples. All this geometry results in a dance company that appears, at first glance, to have been cloned from a batch of particularly pulchritudinous DNA. But, as the show progresses, the homogeny fractures, the copycat wigs are discarded and personalities emerge.
It takes at least a month of intensive training to learn how to dance the Crazy way. Svetlana Konstantinova who auditions, trains and rehearses the dancers, says the key to performing on a pair of high-rise Louboutins is a posture called cambrure (or "arch" in English). It requires pushing out the backside and curving the spine; an exaggerated, unnatural position, particularly for a dancer. The pay-off is that it makes you look spectacular in a pair of heels. "With cambrure, you have much more stability and your leg is straight," says Konstantinova. She says the Crazy Horse has developed its own "secret cambrure" and demonstrates it by gliding across the club's scarlet carpet on the tips of her toes.
Ero Tikka, a 30-year-old Ukrainian dancer who has been a Crazy Girl for almost two years, says some women have natural cambrure. Most don't and it's a slog achieving it. "It's not natural to do it when you're dancing," she concedes – and it does take its toll on the body. "When I first came here I heard girls talking about pain in their back and I thought, oh come on, it's not that hard. But after a few years you begin to feel it. You need to prepare carefully, train your body."
I ask Louboutin about the discomfort inflicted by high heels. He concedes that illusion – giving the appearance of a longer leg or creating a beautiful silhouette, for example – are his primary concerns when designing a shoe, even one for dancers. But he rejects the idea that he is an autocrat who "hates comfort". "Comfort should exist, but it's not the priority," he says. "Not for the kind of shoes I design at least."
He'd be horrified if someone looked at one of his shoes and said, 'Oh my god, it looks so comfortable.' "I wanna hear, 'It looks so beautiful, so desirable'," he says. Besides, a little discomfort is the price you pay for the transformative effects of a good set of heels. "You put a shoe on and it goes bzzzzzzz," he says, tracing the path of an imaginary bolt of energy from his feet to his brain. "It radiates through the entire body."
Bzzzzzz, I murmur, doing my best to put myself in his shoes.
"Yes. The shoe irrigates the blood and body and affects your posture and your behaviour. You become body conscious."
Is that a good thing? "It is not necessarily something a woman wants to do every day," he concedes. "But it's definitely something a good high heel does."
Forever Crazy tours Australia from August 8. See crazyhorseparis.com.au.