'Louboutin girls are very determined' — Simon Doonan

Best quote of the month.

Doonan, the creative director of Barney's, made the observation above to Amy Goldwasser, whose "Talk of the Town" item in the latest (April 14, 2008) issue of the New Yorker magazine — about the grit and determination required to put on Christian Louboutin's 28-inch-high suède pull-on Monica boots (top) — is simply delicious.

It follows.

This Boot is Work

Boots tend not to be twenty-eight inches high. Twenty-eight-inch-high things are more like: your daughter who’s nearly two, an M.T.A. subway turnstile, the bathroom sink, or a suitable-for-show female Great Dane. The measurement is also the daunting height of the most common size—38—sold in Christian Louboutin’s suède pull-on Monica boot, which has a 120-mm. covered heel, no zipper, and extends past mid-thigh.

In shoe departments across the city, the trying on of this boot (cost: $1,790) has inspired F.A.Q.s (“How do those work?”) and varied protocols. There are folders, pushers, rollers, and scrunchers. There are ladies who know that you need to show up at the store wearing something with leg access (“Tights are best—they give you a certain level of slip,” one saleswoman said) and ladies who ask to take the boots with them into the boutique rest room, or who are favored enough clients to get a pair sent home with them to squish into in private. If you’re wearing pants, forget it. “You want a little bit of scrunching,” Shawna Rose, Louboutin’s director of communications, advised recently.“I would just say, even distribution.”

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Michael Nitis, the manager of the Louboutin boutique on Horatio Street, said one afternoon. “It’s going to take a good five minutes to put them on, and a lot of wiggling around.” Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys, observed, “Louboutin girls are very determined. You get the sense if they had an X-Acto knife and some margarine they’d do whatever they could to get that boot on.”

Indeed, the Monica comes with some very public fears: of fat, of failure, of flashing. (At the uptown store, sales were slow until Season Dolan, a five-foot-two saleswoman, wore the boots in black on a busy Saturday in fall; they sold out within the week. Citywide, the first full-size run was gone by early November. By February, they were almost entirely gone.) Which is why anyone maneuvering into a pair wants to be on the north-facing side of Christian Louboutin’s Madison Avenue store. “There are no mirrors over here,” a saleswoman reassured a leg-splaying client one Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, a lovely but sturdy-enough woman in her twenties settled on the mirrored side and requested the Monica, black, size 41½.

The saleswoman, Pavleta Alexieva, came out with a pair in red suède. They’re folders, and efficient ones, at the uptown store. (“I just make it into a knee-high boot and step in,” Dolan said.) Alexieva unfolded the boots, doubled over to fit into the standard Louboutin box, and presented them to the customer, who’d managed to hike her jeans up above her knees. She bent over to begin negotiating. The process came to a halt at the jean line.

“I wish I’d worn a mini,” she said, looking at the exposed joint where rippled blue denim and rippled red suède, like a couple of vacuum-cleaner tubes, almost met. The saleswoman suggested that she come back in a dress.

Christian Louboutin himself is a proponent of the rolling strategy. “I did see girls trying them on. I help these girls,” he recalled, on the telephone. “You have to reverse it so you see the lining, yes. It becomes like a short boot. Then you dive your foot in it and then after, you return the lining, put it back on your legs. It’s a boot but it’s a stocking, almost like a coat for your legs.”

Downtown at Jeffrey, on a serious shopping afternoon, the return of a single black pair (36½) didn’t go unnoticed for more than two minutes.

“The boot’s back!” a salesman exclaimed.

A woman gestured to him. “Do you have?” was all she asked. She held both hands at high-thigh level, as if wading. The salesman, knowing her size, shook his head and sent her to the Louboutin shop on Horatio, a few blocks away.

“Every girl looks at this boot and would love to wear it,” Michael Nitis said. “But not everyone wants to go through the hassle.” He added, “You don’t want to send these home with a woman who lives alone. This boot is work, and I am not going to let my client struggle on her own.”

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You can try on your very own Monica boots at Christian Louboutin stores everywhere.

$1,790.