Christian Louboutin Debuts Short Film, New Shoes In Cannes

by Verena von Pfetten | 5:40 pm, May 17th, 2010

Christian Louboutin is in Cannes this week not only to make sure the film industry’s finest are shod appropriately, but to debut his own cinematic confection. The fifth installment of “Le Carrosse Noir,” a series of seven short films about a trio of sartorial saviors nicknamed “Loubi’s Angels,” went live this week and Louboutin was on hand in Cannes to celebrate.

“Le Carrosse Noir” is French for “The Black Carriage, and Louboutin told Vogue he was inspired by a friend’s real-life shoe crisis.

A few years ago, Louboutin was having lunch in a South of France resort with the wife of an actor in town for the film festival. She was to attend a screening that very night and was in need of shoes. One would expect that to be easily solved by Monsieur Louboutin, but no local store carried his designs, and he doesn’t travel with his collection in case of random emergencies. Louboutin’s dining companion then announced she would simply hire a helicopter to pick up a pair in St.-Tropez. “I thought, well, there should be an easier way to get them,” he says. So Louboutin envisioned an ice cream truck in front of the Hotel du Cap, “not selling ice cream, but shoes.” One 1983 cheese truck tricked out and resprayed black by art director Anne Seibel (she worked with Sofia Coppola on Marie Antoinette), and Louboutin had his Le Carrosse Noir (French for “The Black Carriage”), a fantasy mobile shoe store that he thinks of as “a traveling circus.”

The sixth installment is being filmed in Cannes as we write this.

Photos from Louboutin’s performance and celebration:

PS. We’re actually somewhat surprised that we hadn’t heard a thing about these fanciful films until we saw the photos on Getty — and a part of us wonders if it isn’t because the videos aren’t embeddable. Note to the masterminds behind Louboutin’s website: there’s no harm in making the videos more accessible!