Is Gen Z bringing back Louboutins?

Despite the crippling effects of sky-high stilettos, a new generation of fans can’t stay out of Christian Louboutin heels.

Over the past year, Christian Louboutin heels have been effectively soldered to the feet of pop star Addison Rae.

“I love to walk ridiculous amounts of miles in them, which I actually did recently, and I have crazy blisters on my toes right now,” she said, tenderly holding a pair of the savagely sharp stilettos in a recent GQ video about 10 things she said she “can’t live” without.

Rae doesn’t only “walk a mile” in her Louboutins. She rehearses in them, and she performs in them.

“If you see me out and about, you’ll most likely see me in Louboutins … if not on, they’re always in my car for easy access,” Rae said in an email. “Just in case!”

In her music video Times Like These, she and her dancers gyrate and bend in Louboutins. “There were all these red scuff marks,” Dara Allen, Rae’s stylist, said of the floor after the routine.

In one image on Instagram, Rae flirtatiously cocked her shoes to reveal the blazing red soles next to a printout of her set list. In a TikTok video from June, six pairs of black Louboutins were arranged in a circle, looking almost as if they had gathered for a séance.

In the 2000s and 2010s, Louboutins, often referred to as “Loubs,” reigned supreme in the more buttoned-up sides of the media and fashion worlds. It was the ultimate professional purchase, meant to go with a pencil skirt or shift dress.

Christian Louboutin created the brand in 1991 and developed the red soles a year later, after seeing his assistant painting her nails red. The lacquered outsoles are referred to as “red bottoms,” and when those soles touch mortal ground, every scuff and scratch shows up like scarification. The upkeep can be pricey: getting a pair resoled can cost US$65 ($110), and repainting US$165.

For all of the door-to-car luxuriousness, Louboutins are notoriously uncomfortable. A Reddit thread advises people to blow-dry the leather to soften it or apply blister blocker. In articles from the ’90s and early 2000s, Vogue writers lamented deformed toes and bulbous bunions, hobbling to foot gurus and top-dollar podiatrists.

“I literally broke my metatarsal three times in my 20s because I wore heels every day on the pavement,” said Savannah Engel, founder of the public relations firm Savi. “I walked on and off the subway in 6-inch heels.”

Engel got her first pair of Louboutins in her freshman year of college. “Heaven forbid I brought a change of shoes,” she said.

A few years after Engel entered the world of New York public relations, legacy media began to shift. In the mid-2010s, Condé Nast moved its headquarters to One World Trade Center. There was also a pivot to digital, and dress codes began to change. And then there was the straw – or the Loub – that broke the camel’s back. In 2014, the stiletto heel of a prophetic Louboutin got lodged at the top of the Condé Nast escalator, and its battered red bottom flipped up like a flare gun.

Around this time, Phoebe Philo introduced the fur-lined Birkenstock, offering fashion-obsessed women an alternative to bone-crushing heels. Philo often wore Adidas or New Balance sneakers.

“Women were being invited into sneaker culture, and a lot of high-fashion shoe designers were starting to make sneakers for them,” said Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. “The sneaker was in many ways replacing the high heel.”

(Christian Louboutin declined through a representative to be interviewed for this article.)

The pendulum swings

Devon Lee Carlson, an influencer and a founder of Wildflower Cases, recently posted a photo of herself near the Seine in jeans and a black top, flashing a Loub to the gushy tune of Sometimes by Britney Spears. The red bottom-baring image was accompanied by a quote ripped from a 2014-era Pinterest board: “Put on a cute outfit, call ur girls, messy bun, get it done #summer2025 is here.”

The Louboutins’ resurrection may indeed be tied to the current mid-2010s trend cycle when the red soles regularly dotted Pinterest boards and Tumblr scrolls.

“It was simpler times, on our parents’ phone plan,” said Nicolaia Rips, who writes for i-D magazine. “Gen Z is now approaching their late 20s, life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and they retreat into the safety of middle school trends but with grown-up money.”

But that era’s Louboutin glam-girl reputation feels like a thing of the past. Today, the shoe feels more undone.

“There’s something almost messy, cool girl, nonchalant,” Julia Rabinowitsch, founder of the Millennial Decorator, a footwear resale account, said of the shoe’s resurgence. “But in an in-your-face way, like ‘I’m wearing these red-bottom soles, and you all know what that is.’”

One person who lives in her Louboutins as if they are everyday sneakers is choreographer Lexee Smith, who works with Rae. More often than not, she dances in them.

“The obsession just keeps getting more and more and more and more real,” Smith said. “I can’t really even leave the house without wearing a heel – and most of the time it is a Loub. I need the extra inches to feel in my power.”

So what exactly is that power? Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and the author of Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power, noted that heels can transform even as they disfigure.

“You have this concept that high heels are super-feminine and super-erotic, and they also have that kind of trans quality to them,” she said.

Heels have long been wrapped up in gender stereotypes. “High heels have been associated with erotic femininity since the late 18th century, when men started to turn away from high heels and toward flatter shoes,” Steele said. “Women’s high heels were very high and definitely fetishised.”

In the 1780s, she said, Restif de la Bretonne was running around Paris stealing shoes and having sex with them.

Beauty is pain

While there is buzz around the shoe, there has not been a significant uptick in new sky-high Louboutin purchases, according to the shopping platform Lyst. (Its most popular Louboutins are the Super Loubi studded flip-flops.) But the secondhand market shows a spike that points to a thriftier generation.

“Gen Z is driving much of that momentum,” said Noelle Sciacca of the RealReal. There, Louboutin purchases have nearly doubled year-over-year, she said, and searches are up 34%. New Gen Z buyers are up 82%.

Vintage seems to be the way to go to nab a pair of Louboutins. In the GQ video, Rae revealed that she buys her Louboutins on eBay. Smith said her first pair from a thrift shop once belonged to the wife of country singer Dierks Bentley.

Still, the Louboutin resurgence feels deeper than a mere rehashed trend, perhaps suggesting a more layered “beauty is pain” perspective.

“It’s a painful shoe,” Allen, Addison Rae’s stylist, said. “You’re not really meant to be walking around in them all day. But to do it feels like this effortful ritualistic experience that’s like, ‘OK, I am entering into my glamour mode, and I am going to do it no matter the physical pain because the emotional reward is just so much more.’”

Smith agrees. “You feel like a resilient person after you make it through the whole day,” she said. “It’s like, I am never the person to take my shoes off if I’m in pain. I just power through.”

So what’s the reward beyond great legs and a blistered digit? Allen thinks it comes down to desire.

“The Louboutin is not natural,” she said. “It is like man-made glamour. It creates the sensuality in you, and I think that’s so valuable right now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Liana Satenstein

Photographs by: Caroline Tompkins

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