New Style Idea

Plenty of Met Gala fans point to the 2018 event as a particularly good year — and Christian Louboutin agrees.

During his FN cover shoot, the French designer looked back on some of his favorite celebrity moments in his career. At the top of his list was accompanying actress Blake Lively to the 2018 Met Gala, which had the theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”

“It was a very fun preparation. Blake was really into it,” Louboutin recalled. “The dress was really big, so the whole preparation was a lot of fun.”

The designer created two pairs of shoes for Lively to wear before and during the event, with the red carpet version an over-the-top embellished platform, which the actress wore with an equally ornate custom Versace gown.

“(It was) a peep-toe sandal with three layers of different, successive layers of small platforms, which I adorned in a different way every time,” he said. The gold and burgundy shoe was decorated with passmenterie, an elaborate style of trim work that is often seen in traditional religious garments.

“(They were) exactly she wanted,” said Louboutin. “She’s very specific. At the end she was really incredible.”

Louboutin also reflected on the theme of that year’s event (which also saw Rihanna wearing a glittering pair of his pumps). “There was so much effort, especially that year, and it was linked to something that I like,” he said. “It was a vision of a very baroque idea of religion… really extravagant in a religious way, which you barely see in reality. It was something out of an incredible movie.”