Christian Louboutin: a (red) sole proprietor speaks

Prompted by the AmeriKat's first post yesterday, which reviewed the Red Soles spat between Christian Louboutin and the Gucci Group's Yves St Laurent, the IPKat's friend Mary-Ellen Field (Brand Finance) was inspired to write the following opinion piece which the Kat -- every wary of expensive footwear for the very good reason that he is a quadruped -- is pleased to share with his readers.  It runs like this:

"As the owner of several pairs of much loved and dare I say much admired Christian Louboutin's (I don't expect male readers will understand any of this) I can only think that the Gucci Group must be really desperate to paint their YSL soles red. It seems an incredibly silly thing to do.

Do they really think that women who are prepared to spend over £400 pounds for a pair of CLs will actually change their minds and buy a pair of YSL's because they have red soles? Just because we are prepared to spend a lot of money on shoes does not mean we are stupid (Please try to control yourselves, all you tomcats reading this.  Expensive shoes -- like hair colour and other unmentionables -- are no indication of intelligence or the lack of it)

Listen up YSL, we women buyers of luxury shoes make our choices of the shoes we buy based purely on love: if we love them we buy them. This is very annoying to accountants, lawyers and bankers because love is not measurable. CL is the ultimate status shoe at the moment (in my humble opinion and I could send you a photo of my shoe closet if required to prove this). Wearing our red soled CL works of arts makes us part of a special club, just like owning an Apple product or a Ferrari.

I also quite often love YSL shoes enough to buy them too -- but if you feel the need to try to trick me by adding red soles I won't love you any more. You don't need to pass yourself off as CL, you are beautiful in your own right.

It always amazes me, when I go to so called "luxury events, conferences" etc, that hardly any of the attendees are attired in or carry any luxury products at all. Perhaps the luxury industry pays so badly that they can't afford to buy the products they flog. It is always so disappointing".

This member of the Kat team knows little of female shoe fashion but feels he has a slightly proprietary interest in anything to do with red footwear, since the Red Shoes -- the movie classic of that name -- was co-produced and co-directed by Emeric Pressburger, who had the good fortune to the cousin of this Kat's mother-in-law. Never mind that, Merpel says, what's important here is to find out what other readers think about what, at the very least, seems to have been a curiously risky decision on the part of YSL.