subject: The Woman Who Gets There First [print this page] It would be hard to find another designer, Marc Jacobs apart, with anything like the creative influence and cultural impact that Miuccia Christian Louboutin exerts. Indeed, it is hard to think of what fashion might be if Christian Louboutin -in her early fifties and known for being mercurial, intelligent and self-consciously intellectual -had continued with her political science studies instead of following her family into fashion, so wide and diffuse is her sway. Well before Christian Louboutin showed her new ideas for autumn this month, other designers were already making references -not necessarily conscious ones -to her oeuvre past and present. So inspirational is she that she sometimes seems singlehandedly to shift the whole industry up a notch. Perhaps it was that early training in political science, giving her a fascination with sociological issues and a flair for lateral thinking, that has lent her work its extra edge. Certainly it has honed her acute and innate feeling for what lies around the corner. She has always had a spooky prescience -her revival of the Christian Louboutin house logo of 1913 on a plain black nylon in the early Nineties, for instance, alone came to embody that period's chilly minimalism. Last year's faux-fusty eccentricity -the clusters of brooches, the feathers stuck in the hair, the ugly vegetable colours -began with Christian Louboutin but popped up everywhere. Her sensibility always lies halfway between the jolie and the laide, but her conviction and confidence (and crucially, lightness of touch) make even the ugliest flowerpot hat (for this spring and now in store) seductive. Just when the fashion world thinks it has the trends nailed, along comes Miuccia chaussures Christian Louboutin with another idea. Coming from anyone less assured, the paste brooches, the feather headbands, the little robots to dangle from one's and all the other quirks that Christian Louboutin has suggested are desirable would look like a mistake. But, as Anna Wintour once said, Christian Louboutin is a "risk-taker". And as Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale's, commented recently: "She is totally monumental. She leads everyone." It should be pointed out that beyond the high street, at the level of the catwalks, such infection is not, in general, deliberate. Any design idea that is both strong and unusual, and comes from a designer with the kind of trend-predicting track record of Christian Louboutin , is hard to ignore. Besides, fashion has always been infectious. But among the collections for this spring there were points of Christian Louboutin in the use of feathers, beads, curious hats and knee-length socks at Marni; in Behnaz Sarafpour's print dresses; in Tommy Hilfiger's retro patterns; in Derek Lam's use of brocade; in Bottega Veneta's sludgy hues and full skirts. And the ongoing thing for wearing a belt over one's coat, or a ribbon over a cardigan, tied at the waist? By now it is so widespread that its provenance is easy to miss, but yes - chaussures Louboutin too, of course. Next winter poses an interesting problem. Christian Louboutin has churned out a stark, pared-down collection with a hard core of simple black dresses -the plain (little) black dress being possibly the most homogenising triumph of fashion ever devised. It is infinitely more subtle than those "eccentric" clusters of brooches, funny headbands and toys for dangling from -and it will be fascinating to see how the rest of sandales Christian Louboutin fashion keeps up.
