After the opening of its first hotel in Portugal, the French designer Christian Louboutinfamous for his red-soled footwear, talks creativity and sustainability in an exclusive interview with Dezeen.

“The secret to good design is to be true to yourself. You can take advice from others but in the end, someone has to be the boss: someone has to decide. At some point, one has to decide to be loyal (to the original idea)” he said.

Best known for designing footwear, his career spans over 40 years, during which he has remained true to his creative impulses, most recently expressed in his latest project, a 13-room boutique hotel in the Portuguese village of Melides, south of Lisbon, in which he designed in collaboration with the architect Madalena Caiado.

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In the interview, he cited Hotel Vermelho as an example of how he always stays true to himself; he recounted telling the group “let’s have lots of chimneys – the type you see on rooftops in southern Portugal – because it’s very beautiful.” The architects struggled to connect all the chimneys to the fireplaces to make them work but Louboutin insisted: “I just want the roof with chimneys. We don’t need chimneys that work.” The group worried that merely decorative chimneys, in which form did not follow function, were problematic because they “didn’t serve a purpose,” the designer recalled. “But it is absolutely the most beautiful thing. Most importantly, it looks beautiful. At the end of the day, that’s the most important thing,” he countered. “I felt like I was a little alone at first asking for ‘more chimneys!’ More chimneys!” – because in reality they were completely useless. But it’s fine for it to be useless, absolutely fine.”

He left home at the age of 12 and later designed women’s footwear for brands such as Charles Jourdan, Roger Vivier and Yves Saint Laurent, before founding his own company in 1991; the eponymous brand has now grown into a $2.7 billion business. However, despite success, he still seeks pleasure in creative projects. “When you do something you love, even if it doesn’t work, even if it’s useless, as long as you get pleasure from doing it and it pleases you, you’ll never have wasted your time,” he said. “If you do something that you don’t really love, but you think, ‘Oh, it’s better this way, it’s more comfortable, it’s more useful,’ and you don’t actually like it, in the end the degree of satisfaction – yours and probably others’ – is much more small” he added.

The business landscape has changed significantly since the early 1990s. And Louboutin, now in his 60s, continues to navigate his principles; for example, his brand has nearly 17 million followers on Instagram . “Everything has undoubtedly changed because of social media. When I first started, every brand name had a face that corresponded to the brand name. Yves Saint Laurent wore glasses and his name was Yves Saint Laurent. Givenchy had a man behind it and his name was Hubert de Givenchy. Now, the names are just the brands,” he said.

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Another thing that has changed over the years is the discussion on sustainability. The Christian Louboutin business now has an entire department dedicated to sustainability, but the designer stressed: “Sustainability is not only about products but also about people. Sustainability comes back to respect. When there is some carving on a part of the shoe that has been done in a very specific place – say by artisans of a specific region – in that case I always refuse to copy that savoir faire and go to a country that could, cheaper , to copy it”. “Craft is actually a very important part of the countries culture. You cannot use an artifact by duplicating it elsewhere. Why; Because if you take the essence of the craft from one place and give it to another place to make it cheaper (that’s the only real reason), you basically start to eat away at – and destroy a bit – the ecosystem of a region or country. Sustainability goes all the way to protect the crafthe underlined.

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He himself has had to protect his own art many times; he has defended his company’s trademark red sole in court many times. He has never been limited to designing footwear and while the color red has become his trademark he insists that this is only due to his unceasing passion for the shade which he continues to use in his projects; the brand of the recently opened hotel – Vermelho – is the word for “red” in Portuguese. “Red is a transition. It’s such an emotional color, but it’s also not necessarily associated with color. You may not like colors, but you still like red. If I had to turn back the clock and choose another color, I would choose red again. If I had to stick to one as an identity, I would still keep my red one,” he confessed.