I wish we could say the Louboutin had fallen out of fashion because of Asma Assad, but real life is not like that, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
NOTE TO readers: before we go any further it should be explained that the Louboutin is a shoe that is not particularly attractive and usually very high. It is distinguished both by its conspicuous red sole and its exorbitant price. Just so we are all on the same page here, dudes. Now let’s begin . . .
I wish we could say the Louboutin had fallen out of fashion because Asma Assad (wife of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad) had been revealed as a fan, but life’s not like that really, is it?
Well, fashion life certainly isn’t. If Eva Braun had been snapped in a Burberry trenchcoat, would the fashion pack really have been that far behind, powder puffs at the ready, more than willing to run with the at-home exclusive, a 12-page spread on Eva in her lovely bunker?
Ah, the bunker. It’s when they’re in the bunker that the husbands are accused of genocide and the wives are accused of conspicuous consumption; and we all know who comes out of that the worst.
Since the time of Marie Antoinette, the deal has been that the tyrant’s wife is conscience-free, a ruthless accumulator who should be shot before her husband – and the rest of us love how bad she is. I mean, who can remember the first name of Imelda Marcos’s husband now (it was Ferdinand), yet any little girl with a wardrobe full of shoes knows what it means to be an Imelda (it means you are an insatiable hoarder of shoes).
And the Louboutin itself is the most conspicuous of shoes. Its high heel makes it fit only for taxis and red carpets. It takes an embittered feminist and a tired shopper to note that Christian Louboutin himself is photographed wearing very flat shoes indeed – in one section of his website he is shown leaping in the air, a manoeuvre quite impossible whilst wearing the shoes he sells to women – in a pair of flip-flops.
Luckily, I am free at the moment, with plenty of time on my hands. Time to notice that despite his own resistance to being crippled by high heels, Louboutin’s shoe empire has a mighty reach.
The Louboutin has become the McDonald’s of shoes. There are 50 stores altogether worldwide, the website says. There are stores in Jeddah, Kuwait City and Riyadh – as well as in New York, Tokyo and what we more old-fashioned types like to think of as the more predictable places. The truth is that, in the fashion industry for the past 20 years, Jeddah, Kuwait City and Riyadh are the predictable places.
Louboutin was born in Paris, was once a garden designer, and has got terribly lucky. Because the Louboutin has conquered the part of the female world that wants to look rich and not move too much – a sizeable market, when you think about it.
The Louboutin is the perfect shoe for a dictator’s wife. Mrs Assad was online talking about a special pair of Louboutins which, she said, were not available to the general public, and had special crystals attached to them. Louboutins seem to have become something of a specialist subject for her, not to say a perversion.
But if Assad is on her computer ordering batches of necklaces, bespoke tables and a fondue set in rather an inelegant way, then she also scrubs up lovely and turns out looking a credit to her husband.
She is photogenic and her husband is not. No wonder that, before the uprisings, the scrutiny of the West fell on her and not on him.
She looks, as Nicolas Sarkozy remarked, “modern”. By this Sarkozy most likely meant “desirable” and possibly also “well-dressed”. Assad’s husband could not be all bad, said Sarkozy, with a wife who was so modern.
The French think that good taste solves everything. The Irish think Louboutins solve everything – we bought them at a wholesale rate during the boom. Carrie from Sex And The City wore them.
Louboutins are modern, expensive and girly; in the minefield of fashion in particular and modern shopping in general they are a safe consumer bet. Mrs Assad seems to have done pretty much everything she could to show she is the ideal modern woman. A devoted wife – “I love you,” she writes to her husband at the end of pretty mundane emails – a great dresser, a beautiful woman.
Her public relations campaign was so successful that, even as the killings in Syria began, Asma Assad was being trumpeted on the cover of American Vogue as “The Rose Of The Desert”. Meanwhile her husband is surrounded by nubile PR advisers who send him emails telling him how much they miss him.
More damningly still, he is downloading country and western music. Truly, the consumer choices of others are very interesting.
Mrs Assad seems to have applied to do a business course at an American university, like so many executive wives before her.
She was in banking before her marriage. Perhaps she is, as Sarkozy said, modern. But she is also in a long line of tyrants’ wives who will, if she is lucky, soon be passing through an international airport accessorised with a lot of matching luggage and a pair of very large sunglasses.