Louboutin - Personal Life and Ethnic Background

Personal Life and Ethnic Background

Louboutin was born and raised in Paris's 12th arrondissement. He was the only son of Roger, an ébeniste (cabinet-maker), and Irene, a homemaker, his parents are European French and he has three sisters. Louboutin 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 the same interview he also recounted an incident where his dark European looks were the focus of racial hatred. One day he was out with a friend "in leopard, with high heels who was half-Spanish, half-Vietnamese". Louboutin, needed to use a restaurant toilet. "The staff went crazy! One guy grabbed my friend by her hair and started calling her a "little bitch". I took my fist to him, and he screamed, ‘Don’t you dare touch a white guy or I’ll crush your nose even more flat than it is’. I wasn’t in a black or mixed race family, so I had no experience of racism. But still, I was different... for a few days I wanted to go back there and kill them," he admitted. "I was full of anger."

Louboutin was expelled from school three times and ran away from home at the age of 12, at which point his indulgent mother allowed him to move out to live at a friend's house. Louboutin faced much opposition when he decided to drop out from school. However he claims that what helped him make up his mind was an interview on TV with Sophia Loren in which she introduced her sister, saying she had to leave school when she was only 12, but when she turned 50, she got her degree. He later remarked, "Everybody applauded! And I thought, 'Well, at least if I regret it I'm going to be like the sister of Sophia Loren!'"

Landscape architect Louis Benech has been his partner since 1997. Louboutin and his partner spend time between their homes in Paris’s 1st arrondissement, a fisherman's cottage in Lisbon, a palace in Aleppo, a houseboat on the Nile christened Dahabibi-my love boat, and a house in Luxor. The Luxor domicile is a former craftsman’s workshop, made of earthen bricks, to which he has added an additional floor and a rooftop belvedere. Additionally, he also shares a 13th-century castle in the Vendée with his business partner Bruno Chamberlain.

Louboutin claims that his unusual pastimes include trapeze flying, inspired by the film Wings of Desire, and that inspirations come from showgirls and music halls — not fashion (or la mode), which he asserts becomes quickly dated.