もうひとつの世界：アレン・ジョーンズとの対談でクリスチャン・ルブタン

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

It might sound somewhat hackneyed to suggest that the lauded shoe designer Christian Louboutin and the groundbreaking contemporary artist Allen Jones are natural bedfellows. Yet it is also undeniably true.

They are drawn to a similar aesthetic, sharing an obsession with sculptural objects and expressions of idealised femininity. There is also a mutual fixation on high-heeled shoes, to the delight of retifists around the globe. Louboutin first encountered the high heels that would become his signature as an image: he remembers a sign banning the wearing of stilettos in the Palais de la Porte Dorée museum, in southeast Paris, noticed during visits as a child. Ironically, in 2020, Louboutin would stage a major retrospective inside the same space. It celebrated the span of his work since his label was founded in 1991 and was also the catalyst for his friendship with Jones – he included the artist’s mixed-media sculpture Stepping Out (2018) next to a 1959 feathered coat created by Jean Louis for Marlene Dietrich. 

Jones, too, discovered high heels via pictures, in his case popular illustrations of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly soft-core pin-up girls. These were first reclaimed and referenced in his pioneering pop work of the early 1960s, begun while he was still a student at the Royal College of Art – its reference to mass consumer society and embrace of the figurative a conscious retaliation to the prevalent abstraction of that period. Self-described as a “painter who sculpts”, Jones developed a practice across six decades that has often flitted between two dimensions and three, with sculptural elements added to canvas-based pieces and paint applied to his often-provocative figurative sculptures. He was one of the earliest British pop artists and remains one of the most famous.

Here, Louboutin and Jones come together as friends and kindred spirits to discuss their individual inspirations, crossover collaborations and respective creative worlds. Alongside are photographs of Louboutin’s Paris home.

Christian Louboutin We first met after you went to see L’Exhibition[niste] at the Palais de la Porte Dorée [in 2020] – it was my first important exhibition, and in Paris, which is my city. Around my work I gathered important inspirations for me and I immediately said, “There can’t be an exhibition about me without Allen Jones being represented, it would be impossible.”

Allen Jones Our interest in the figure crosses over. I happen to work in one area, you work in another. And then you enabled me to experiment in video (1) – I had used it only once before to animate one of my sculptures.

CL The Hatstand sculpture? (2)

AJ Hatstand, which was never actually called that. When I made it, in 1969, it was the end of the pop period. The art pendulum was swinging back to total abstraction. There was this idea that because Donald Judd had made a stack of boxes you could no longer represent the figure, which is obviously absurd, since it’s been a compulsion since the first marks were ever made. I realised the problem wasn’t figuration, it was the old-fashioned language being used. I rang up Madame Tussauds – I thought if I ordered the figure to my specification, it would remove my expressionist involvement. The obsession with the figure is there, but people don’t have the prop of art history. But they asked me what the figure should be doing. I hadn’t thought about that, so I just said, “The figure is saying hello.” My idea was to get clothes from C&A on Oxford Street, but I realised it would look like a wacky window-display model with very big breasts. In America I’d seen these adult comics with this erotic edge to them, drawings of a figure as a table, and I thought that would further dislocate the viewer’s expectations – if the sculpture appears to have a function. I made the table sculpture and then the chair sculpture, and the first figure became a “hat stand”. It wasn’t, but the title stuck.

CL I’m trying to think of the first work I saw of yours. I remember one painting, very vividly, now at the Tate [Wet Seal , 1966]. It’s just the legs, and one shoe is blank. It was really about the line of the heel, the profile.

AJ The thing is, I thought that I liked high heels, but you, Christian, really go the distance. When I was first on the US west coast in the 1960s, the woman I was staying with would get a catalogue through the door from Frederick’s of Hollywood. I was trying to find ways of representing the figure that didn’t represent the history of art, and here were these drawings of nightdresses, hats, one page covered with shoes. And the mantra was always, as though it was the ultimate ideal, “almost a 4½-inch heel”. I suppose they worked out that above that it’s difficult to walk, which is what happened with Kim Kardashian …

CL Yes, you went with Kim to the Met Gala, because you dressed her in one of your sculptures. 

AJ And she was wearing your shoes. My gallery rang and said there’s been this request, and I said I’m happy to design a costume but I can’t be responsible for making it. But Paddy and Keir at Whitaker Malem, who do my leather, came on board. I also said, as long as I don’t have to get on a plane. Kim came on a private jet the next day. My studio is on a five-acre site near the Cotswolds, and we open our big double gates and it was like Donald Trump’s cavalcade was arriving – huge, black, darkened-glass limos full of very well-built men – and she got out of the car with someone leaning over her shoulder photographing her. 

She wanted to wear my Body Armour sculpture [1978], and she’s 5ft 2in, so the neck of the figure was around the top of her head – even Kate Moss wearing Body Armour [for a photograph in 2013] had to stand on a couple of telephone directories so she could fit the body, because it wasn’t made for a person, it was made as a sculpture. I think Kim thought if we cut it, made a joint with glue, she could walk in it. But I wasn’t interested in sawing up a sculpture. In fact, the one she liked most was a unique piece, with very large breasts and the metal flake paint you saw on those American fast cars in the 1970s, a very exotic surface. But she couldn’t possibly walk in it, so we took a cast [of her body]. She wanted to show her crotch, so an asymmetrical leather skirt was glued around [the breastplate] onto the surface of the fibreglass, and I painted over that, so the colour flowed off it. Kim has this lustrous black hair and she looked like a Gauguin painting. I was shocked when I got to New York and she was wearing a blonde wig. I thought the black hair was so important to it, she just shone. But I suddenly realised, Jones, this is not a sculpture, this is costume design, and therefore compromises happen. It’s something I’m not used to but you are likely familiar with.

“Some shoes are there to dress, some shoes are there to undress, or to keep the nudity correct, and they’re definitely not the same shoes” – Christian Louboutin

CL I’m not making sculptures, that’s a big difference. I’m used to reading between the lines and translating what people want into a form of reality. Talking of very high heels, I always first ask the size of the foot, because you’re tiptoeing, and if you’re a size 39 or 40, the surface area is different – a bigger foot can go on a higher heel. I started this company 45 years ago, and let’s say that, for the past 20, I’ve been doing made to measure, and the funniest is always weddings. Every woman, for this particular day, is suddenly not technical, it’s all about fantasy. And me, who is always about fantasy, suddenly I’m the technical one. Because they’ll want the highest heel – “I want to be able to fly.” And I have to reshape, because for this day, you have to be comfortable, to forget about your shoes. I listen, but always do a plan B, and often the plan A ends up on the sister or the bridesmaid. I remember one woman said, “I love this man but I still want my individuality. I’m going to build a dress that has a piece of metal protecting my heart, metal armour, and you have to do the same for the shoes – I want an armoury for the feet.” Poor girl, she’s going to be trouble! But it’s a moment where people get very nervous and the nerves need to go into one thing. It’s not going to be the husband – too late for that, right? It’s not going to be the dress, because it’s too complicated, so all that energy tends to focus either on the hair – they drive the hairdresser crazy – or the shoes. I never take it personally because I know it has to be expelled somewhere. 

But I have a question – if I say the word Pigalle, what does it evoke for you?

AJ I would say the Folies Bergère, the showgirls I associate with the Parisian district. Why do you ask?

CL I did a shoe called La Pigalle, and it’s a very French thing, so I wondered what that conjures for someone who has travelled and who knows Paris as you do. The Folies are in the 9th arrondissement and Pigalle is further north, but Pigalle is definitely a district that evokes the night somehow. I lived in Pigalle for 15 years, and you know how in certain places the light is correct at a certain moment? For instance, I was just in Seattle, it was totally grey, it fits. You go to Greece, the correct light is a silver light. With Pigalle, the correct moment is night. Pigalle has been built and made for light in the evening – during the day it looks a bit dull. It’s not ugly, but it animates in the evening, not only because it’s Paris, and everything has been shaped to become beautiful or inspiring or furious in the evening. It’s absolutely obvious Pigalle buildings need this particular evening light.

AJ One of the first times I was in an international exhibition as a youngster – the British Council had an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris – I was with Francis Bacon, and we went to a club called Madame Arthur, a strip joint for trans dancers, and it was an eye-opener for me. Towards the finale, the audience started to get involved and a British Council representative ran up on stage and disappeared into the wings. We never saw him again. 

CL Madame Arthur still exists. It’s actually a traditional cabaret and the speciality was always trans women. In the late 1970s, when I was a teenager, I used to go out very young, 12 or 13, and I had lots of good friends in the area – Hélène, Marie-France, Jenny.

AJ If it had been 1910, I’d have wanted to move to Paris in my twenties, but New York was the place in the 1960s. I spent some time in the Chelsea Hotel, but it was really before the Chelsea girls. I was there in 1964 – I was given a contract by an American gallery after my first exhibition in London and moved into the Chelsea, this old Victorian building. On the door was a plaque saying Dylan Thomas had “sailed out to die” from there. Claes Oldenburg’s first wife [Patty Mucha] lived in the hotel, so I saw these now very famous soft sculptures of old books in her room, and for me it opened up the field of what art could be. 

The French artist Arman was there too – his apartment was full of incredible art, including African art, he was absolutely nuts about it. One day there was a fire alarm and I could see fire engines with all these hoses going in through the front door, smoke coming up the stairs, so I soaked towels for me and my wife and we wrapped them round our heads, but by the time we got downstairs it was all over and everyone thought we looked ridiculous. I said to Arman, you’re on the first floor, you might break a leg but you could at least jump out the window. And looking at his incredible collection of artwork, I said, “If you were going to jump out the window, what treasure would you take with you?” And he pointed to a Lichtenstein painting, which was about a metre square, a comic-strip rendition of a slice of cheese. I loved the idea that with all the history of the world on his shelves, he’d take the slice of cheese.

CL Don’t forget that he’s French. Cheese is important. I think I would take the sheets, with some of my ties attached to them to make a parachute, then I would take one of your beautiful sculptures and use her to glide down – it’s probably the only artwork that would help me. The other sculpture I have is a Gandhara bust in limestone, which would probably crush me. What would you take?

AJ Oh, pills, I think.

CL Anti-inflammatory, on the way down. See, I’ve thought about this because it happened to me on a boat that was on fire in the Aegean Sea. I took my passport because identity has become so contentious nowadays, I feel better with my passport. But I could float on one of your sculptures or sit astride it. What was the first piece of art you bought? 

AJ It was a lithograph by Sam Francis, who was showing at the gallery that had given me my first contract – Arthur Tooth & Sons on Bruton Street. I taught art for a couple of years before I was able to live off my paintings, and I taught lithography, so I bought the Sam Francis with my first bit of surplus cash.

CL When did you start living off your paintings?

AJ In 1964. I was 26 when I went to New York, and I was teaching up to the moment I went. But in those days a gallery paid you a monthly stipend, just like being paid by a factory, and at the end of the year either you owed them art or they owed you money.

CL As a child born in Paris, into a very working-class family, we never travelled. I mean, we went to Brittany, where my family is from, and sometimes to visit aunts in another district. My first travel was going to the museum, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, where I had my exhibition. There, as a little boy, suddenly I realised the world was bigger than my neighbourhood. I saw so many civilisations, objects that opened my eyes or my appetite for travel. I wanted to travel to really see things, not as a tourist. Also, in France, every child reads Tintin from the age of five, avidly, for ten years minimum, and Tintin was a reporter who travelled the world. I think as a child I wanted to Tintin-ise my life, somehow. 

But I wondered, I’m sometimes surprised that people see a lot of sexualisation in my work – which is perfectly fine, but I see a lot of other things. For instance, if I use spikes, it’s more a decorative thing than a bondage thing for me. An artist or designer suggests things and then people project onto that. What about you? Your work has often been depicted as very sexual – what is your take on that?

“I look at beauty as a sort of Greek ideal from antiquity, but when Michelangelo is carving his figures, he’s not thinking, this is a guy I’d like to go to bed with. He’s involved with making this surface right” – Allen Jones

AJ There is that parallel reading. If someone is writing about my work, they feel they should take into account the social implications that the work has been used to illustrate, or an editor will tell a writer they have to ask me about sex, because I provided this image at the beginning of my career by showing a woman being treated as an object. There’s nothing I could say for 15 years or more that didn’t sound like an apology. One of the central principles in my work is wanting to make the viewer feel physically involved with the surface, so the paint surfaces I make are very fluid and smooth, and I think they arouse a kind of tactile sense. It’s like looking at a [Jean-Auguste-Dominique] Ingres painting like Madame Moitessier [1851] (3) – the material is painted so perfectly that although you’re not touching it, your senses can feel the velvet as opposed to the cotton. Having a three-dimensional form was a way of wanting to engage the viewer’s sense of touch and, in my head, it makes it more real. I’ve always been attracted to beauty – beautiful women, beautiful men. I look at beauty as a sort of Greek ideal from antiquity, but when Michelangelo is carving his figures, he’s not thinking, this is a guy I’d like to go to bed with. He’s involved with making this surface right.

CL And in your paintings with legs, I’ve never seen a pointed shoe. I was wondering, do you dislike a pointed shoe or is it the fact that the shape of the legs and the arch of the foot always end up kind of short and would look wrong with a point?

AJ You’re right, I seldom point the shoe or really illustrate the toe. It’s very much the athletic shape of the leg and the arched foot, so by the time you’ve got over the instep and you’re down to the toe, it’s then going into the ground as a contour. It’s not that I have anything against the pointed shoe – the illustration is there as much as it’s needed to describe the determination of the foot. 

CL I was thinking it’s very Frederick’s of Hollywood, those catalogues you were mentioning, very short front with a round toe. For me, some shoes are there to dress, some shoes are there to undress, or to keep the nudity correct, and they’re definitely not the same shoes. Clients will come and ask for a nude shoe, just to have the silhouette and the shoe disappear. But you know I was showing these “flesh colour” shoes and someone who was working with me was rightly really pissed off because she is black and she said, “It’s not flesh, it’s beige. This is not my colour.” I apologised to her and it was corrected to cover the different complexions. But I’ve deeply observed in your work that when you are painting legs and the foot, it’s still anatomy. You’re not dressing the body. You’re leaving the body kind of naked because you reveal and you respect, let’s say, the female lines. You’re definitely not dressing.

AJ No. In fact, I’m always undressing. It’s interesting because, when I’m painting figures, usually there is some form of garment on, but I am aware that the garment is simply helping to describe the form.

CL Do you sketch or draw every day? Me, it depends where I am. For instance, Paris is my headquarters, so I don’t have a studio in Paris where I draw. To concentrate, I go to places I’m used to – it can be Brazil, Egypt, Brittany, Portugal, but I have to be in a place where I’m not going to be distracted, and then it becomes a routine. 

“I realised then that I don’t know much, but I know how to sketch a shoe, and I owe that to you, Allen” – Christian Louboutin

AJ I keep all my drawings over the years and they’re a source of inspiration. Sometimes when you’re in between ideas or finished with a thing you’ve been obsessed with, looking through the drawings suddenly sparks something, so I always draw – it’s like doing press-ups, I suppose. 

CL You do press-ups? 

AJ I do 50 press-ups every day. I think if there were an instructor looking, he’d say I was cheating slightly.

When I’m playing with ideas for paintings, I use what I call a storyboard. Rather than turn the page in a notepad, you can scan along and consequently you can play with ideas and see whether you’re going into cul-de-sacs, so I keep these long sheets. For a lifetime almost, I’ve produced the same number of pictures. I’d be lucky if I did 12 paintings a year. I use oil paint, which obviously doesn’t dry quickly, and my way of working is meditative. I use fairly thin paint, so it allows me to glaze, to build up. Even if the paint appears to be opaque, it does have an effect over another colour. A painting can easily take me several months, although I’ll have two or three on the go.

CL I have to say, when I sketch, at the end of the day, whatever I sketch is going to be transformed into a three-dimensional shoe. But if the line of the cleavage is not correct, or if there is a little bit of a bump in the curve, I will redo, redo. It needs to look exactly, actually, like a painting of yours. I’ve looked at your work since I don’t even remember. I’ve met artists, without giving any names, who when they draw a shoe, the proportion is wrong. There is no emotion. There is no sensuality. For instance, I have a friend who’s a fantastic artist who does beautiful miniatures, and then they did a portrait of me holding a shoe, and I was like, “The portrait is beautiful but the shoe is so ugly!” And it’s a very simple thing for me. I realised then that I don’t know much, but I know how to sketch a shoe, and I owe that to you. You are the master of the definition of a great silhouette. I never considered my sketches beautiful, but it gave me some tiny pride that I know how to draw a shoe.

AJ Tell me, what did your family do? 

CL My father was a cabinet-maker, wood carpenter. He worked for a train firm, doing the carpentry of the sofa that was going to be in the next train, for example. He was very detail-orientated. And my mother was very solar – she was all over the place, so amusing, happy, jolly. My father was kind of darker, a little bit sombre, looking at things in the smallest detail. I gave all the credit of how I am to my mother, because she’s a sun. But when they both died, I realised that I’m really a mixture of the two, because for instance, my mother was not detail-orientated at all, she was a mess, and in my work I’m very detailed, which comes from my father. As a child you never think about the importance of the moon, you think of the sun, and yet I see in nature that the moon has a real impact on flowers, how things grow. I say the sun makes it grow but the moon gives the roots. I have the feeling that my roots are my father and I’ve been brightened by my mother. But I realised this all very late.

AJ It’s interesting how those things are taken in subconsciously, and there is this continuity that, however different one’s background might be, you learn by association. My father worked in a metal-box company that made the machines that made tin cans, and so in the [Second World War] he was excused military service because the machines simply started producing shells instead. But he was an amateur watercolourist, and so my earliest memory was standing looking at him while he practised doing washes for the skies. He had books on how to watercolour and my eye level was at table height, watching my father mix up this blue, do two strokes, always overlapping each one from the previous, and then you get this perfect blue sky. I’d see him practising this on Sunday afternoons, his day off. It wasn’t that it was rammed down my throat, it was just there.

CL The layering, that’s you transforming that. I remember we were in your studio looking at some new sculptures, and I said they look very Egyptian, and you told me you’d never thought about that. And then at the end of our dinner, you said, “You know what, I was travelling in Egypt recently … ” To me, it was so obvious, the figures are really sculpted, with something so perennial and reaching perfection, but they are also guardians of an aesthetic, a stable aesthetic – so strong.

AJ Also, in India there are the temples of Khajuraho (4), known for their large erotic carvings, and it was just fantastic to look at these things from a totally different cultural era.

CL Yes, probably 1000 AD.

AJ Being brought up with the European idea where your perception of figures comes from Greece, to see a different perspective was terrific. I liked that they’d been on that wall for centuries and no one’s saying, “We must shield the children’s eyes.” They’re just there and there was something very graceful about it.

CL Look at the nudity in Egypt too. In Egypt, the female figure is always represented dressed, but with a kind of transparency, and you do see the body, you absolutely see the human shapes. I have a house in Luxor, opposite the city by the holy mountain of Ta Dehent, overlooking the river.

AJ The scale in Luxor is just beyond belief. Stone slabs the size of a van, and they were cutting them with string. The time that would take … It’s not by accident that you say something is a pharaonic work when you want to say something is over the top in terms of size. It’s like they wanted to compete with the landscape.

CL Maybe someone’s grandchild was going to see the result of those temples. We don’t think long-term now. It’s like my garden in Brittany – if you want quick results, gardens are probably not for you. You have to plan a garden thinking, this is going to be for the next generation.

1. Christian Louboutin commissioned Allen Jones to create a video artwork for his show L’Exhibition[niste] Chapter II, held in Monaco in 2022 at the Grimaldi Forum. The video showed figures based on Jones’s Body Armour sculptures and wearing Christian Louboutin shoes.
2. Jones’s 1969 Hatstand sculpture was part of a triptych of erotic furniture works that also included Table and Chair, in which women’s bodies were fetishistically reimagined and contorted to function as domestic furniture. 
3. Ingres produced two paintings of the financier’s wife Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier, dated 1851 and 1856. The former, a standing portrait, depicts her in a lustrous black velvet dress. 
4. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments, now a Unesco World Heritage site, was built in Madhya Pradesh between 950 and 1050. The temples’ explicit carvings depicting couples and tantric themes sit side by side with images of daily life, gods and warfare.

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 17 September 2026. Pre-order here. 

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

It might sound somewhat hackneyed to suggest that the lauded shoe designer Christian Louboutin and the groundbreaking contemporary artist Allen Jones are natural bedfellows. Yet it is also undeniably true.

They are drawn to a similar aesthetic, sharing an obsession with sculptural objects and expressions of idealised femininity. There is also a mutual fixation on high-heeled shoes, to the delight of retifists around the globe. Louboutin first encountered the high heels that would become his signature as an image: he remembers a sign banning the wearing of stilettos in the Palais de la Porte Dorée museum, in southeast Paris, noticed during visits as a child. Ironically, in 2020, Louboutin would stage a major retrospective inside the same space. It celebrated the span of his work since his label was founded in 1991 and was also the catalyst for his friendship with Jones – he included the artist’s mixed-media sculpture Stepping Out (2018) next to a 1959 feathered coat created by Jean Louis for Marlene Dietrich. 

Jones, too, discovered high heels via pictures, in his case popular illustrations of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly soft-core pin-up girls. These were first reclaimed and referenced in his pioneering pop work of the early 1960s, begun while he was still a student at the Royal College of Art – its reference to mass consumer society and embrace of the figurative a conscious retaliation to the prevalent abstraction of that period. Self-described as a “painter who sculpts”, Jones developed a practice across six decades that has often flitted between two dimensions and three, with sculptural elements added to canvas-based pieces and paint applied to his often-provocative figurative sculptures. He was one of the earliest British pop artists and remains one of the most famous.

Here, Louboutin and Jones come together as friends and kindred spirits to discuss their individual inspirations, crossover collaborations and respective creative worlds. Alongside are photographs of Louboutin’s Paris home.

Christian Louboutin We first met after you went to see L’Exhibition[niste] at the Palais de la Porte Dorée [in 2020] – it was my first important exhibition, and in Paris, which is my city. Around my work I gathered important inspirations for me and I immediately said, “There can’t be an exhibition about me without Allen Jones being represented, it would be impossible.”

Allen Jones Our interest in the figure crosses over. I happen to work in one area, you work in another. And then you enabled me to experiment in video (1) – I had used it only once before to animate one of my sculptures.

CL The Hatstand sculpture? (2)

AJ Hatstand, which was never actually called that. When I made it, in 1969, it was the end of the pop period. The art pendulum was swinging back to total abstraction. There was this idea that because Donald Judd had made a stack of boxes you could no longer represent the figure, which is obviously absurd, since it’s been a compulsion since the first marks were ever made. I realised the problem wasn’t figuration, it was the old-fashioned language being used. I rang up Madame Tussauds – I thought if I ordered the figure to my specification, it would remove my expressionist involvement. The obsession with the figure is there, but people don’t have the prop of art history. But they asked me what the figure should be doing. I hadn’t thought about that, so I just said, “The figure is saying hello.” My idea was to get clothes from C&A on Oxford Street, but I realised it would look like a wacky window-display model with very big breasts. In America I’d seen these adult comics with this erotic edge to them, drawings of a figure as a table, and I thought that would further dislocate the viewer’s expectations – if the sculpture appears to have a function. I made the table sculpture and then the chair sculpture, and the first figure became a “hat stand”. It wasn’t, but the title stuck.

CL I’m trying to think of the first work I saw of yours. I remember one painting, very vividly, now at the Tate [Wet Seal , 1966]. It’s just the legs, and one shoe is blank. It was really about the line of the heel, the profile.

AJ The thing is, I thought that I liked high heels, but you, Christian, really go the distance. When I was first on the US west coast in the 1960s, the woman I was staying with would get a catalogue through the door from Frederick’s of Hollywood. I was trying to find ways of representing the figure that didn’t represent the history of art, and here were these drawings of nightdresses, hats, one page covered with shoes. And the mantra was always, as though it was the ultimate ideal, “almost a 4½-inch heel”. I suppose they worked out that above that it’s difficult to walk, which is what happened with Kim Kardashian …

CL Yes, you went with Kim to the Met Gala, because you dressed her in one of your sculptures. 

AJ And she was wearing your shoes. My gallery rang and said there’s been this request, and I said I’m happy to design a costume but I can’t be responsible for making it. But Paddy and Keir at Whitaker Malem, who do my leather, came on board. I also said, as long as I don’t have to get on a plane. Kim came on a private jet the next day. My studio is on a five-acre site near the Cotswolds, and we open our big double gates and it was like Donald Trump’s cavalcade was arriving – huge, black, darkened-glass limos full of very well-built men – and she got out of the car with someone leaning over her shoulder photographing her. 

She wanted to wear my Body Armour sculpture [1978], and she’s 5ft 2in, so the neck of the figure was around the top of her head – even Kate Moss wearing Body Armour [for a photograph in 2013] had to stand on a couple of telephone directories so she could fit the body, because it wasn’t made for a person, it was made as a sculpture. I think Kim thought if we cut it, made a joint with glue, she could walk in it. But I wasn’t interested in sawing up a sculpture. In fact, the one she liked most was a unique piece, with very large breasts and the metal flake paint you saw on those American fast cars in the 1970s, a very exotic surface. But she couldn’t possibly walk in it, so we took a cast [of her body]. She wanted to show her crotch, so an asymmetrical leather skirt was glued around [the breastplate] onto the surface of the fibreglass, and I painted over that, so the colour flowed off it. Kim has this lustrous black hair and she looked like a Gauguin painting. I was shocked when I got to New York and she was wearing a blonde wig. I thought the black hair was so important to it, she just shone. But I suddenly realised, Jones, this is not a sculpture, this is costume design, and therefore compromises happen. It’s something I’m not used to but you are likely familiar with.

“Some shoes are there to dress, some shoes are there to undress, or to keep the nudity correct, and they’re definitely not the same shoes” – Christian Louboutin

CL I’m not making sculptures, that’s a big difference. I’m used to reading between the lines and translating what people want into a form of reality. Talking of very high heels, I always first ask the size of the foot, because you’re tiptoeing, and if you’re a size 39 or 40, the surface area is different – a bigger foot can go on a higher heel. I started this company 45 years ago, and let’s say that, for the past 20, I’ve been doing made to measure, and the funniest is always weddings. Every woman, for this particular day, is suddenly not technical, it’s all about fantasy. And me, who is always about fantasy, suddenly I’m the technical one. Because they’ll want the highest heel – “I want to be able to fly.” And I have to reshape, because for this day, you have to be comfortable, to forget about your shoes. I listen, but always do a plan B, and often the plan A ends up on the sister or the bridesmaid. I remember one woman said, “I love this man but I still want my individuality. I’m going to build a dress that has a piece of metal protecting my heart, metal armour, and you have to do the same for the shoes – I want an armoury for the feet.” Poor girl, she’s going to be trouble! But it’s a moment where people get very nervous and the nerves need to go into one thing. It’s not going to be the husband – too late for that, right? It’s not going to be the dress, because it’s too complicated, so all that energy tends to focus either on the hair – they drive the hairdresser crazy – or the shoes. I never take it personally because I know it has to be expelled somewhere. 

But I have a question – if I say the word Pigalle, what does it evoke for you?

AJ I would say the Folies Bergère, the showgirls I associate with the Parisian district. Why do you ask?

CL I did a shoe called La Pigalle, and it’s a very French thing, so I wondered what that conjures for someone who has travelled and who knows Paris as you do. The Folies are in the 9th arrondissement and Pigalle is further north, but Pigalle is definitely a district that evokes the night somehow. I lived in Pigalle for 15 years, and you know how in certain places the light is correct at a certain moment? For instance, I was just in Seattle, it was totally grey, it fits. You go to Greece, the correct light is a silver light. With Pigalle, the correct moment is night. Pigalle has been built and made for light in the evening – during the day it looks a bit dull. It’s not ugly, but it animates in the evening, not only because it’s Paris, and everything has been shaped to become beautiful or inspiring or furious in the evening. It’s absolutely obvious Pigalle buildings need this particular evening light.

AJ One of the first times I was in an international exhibition as a youngster – the British Council had an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris – I was with Francis Bacon, and we went to a club called Madame Arthur, a strip joint for trans dancers, and it was an eye-opener for me. Towards the finale, the audience started to get involved and a British Council representative ran up on stage and disappeared into the wings. We never saw him again. 

CL Madame Arthur still exists. It’s actually a traditional cabaret and the speciality was always trans women. In the late 1970s, when I was a teenager, I used to go out very young, 12 or 13, and I had lots of good friends in the area – Hélène, Marie-France, Jenny.

AJ If it had been 1910, I’d have wanted to move to Paris in my twenties, but New York was the place in the 1960s. I spent some time in the Chelsea Hotel, but it was really before the Chelsea girls. I was there in 1964 – I was given a contract by an American gallery after my first exhibition in London and moved into the Chelsea, this old Victorian building. On the door was a plaque saying Dylan Thomas had “sailed out to die” from there. Claes Oldenburg’s first wife [Patty Mucha] lived in the hotel, so I saw these now very famous soft sculptures of old books in her room, and for me it opened up the field of what art could be. 

The French artist Arman was there too – his apartment was full of incredible art, including African art, he was absolutely nuts about it. One day there was a fire alarm and I could see fire engines with all these hoses going in through the front door, smoke coming up the stairs, so I soaked towels for me and my wife and we wrapped them round our heads, but by the time we got downstairs it was all over and everyone thought we looked ridiculous. I said to Arman, you’re on the first floor, you might break a leg but you could at least jump out the window. And looking at his incredible collection of artwork, I said, “If you were going to jump out the window, what treasure would you take with you?” And he pointed to a Lichtenstein painting, which was about a metre square, a comic-strip rendition of a slice of cheese. I loved the idea that with all the history of the world on his shelves, he’d take the slice of cheese.

CL Don’t forget that he’s French. Cheese is important. I think I would take the sheets, with some of my ties attached to them to make a parachute, then I would take one of your beautiful sculptures and use her to glide down – it’s probably the only artwork that would help me. The other sculpture I have is a Gandhara bust in limestone, which would probably crush me. What would you take?

AJ Oh, pills, I think.

CL Anti-inflammatory, on the way down. See, I’ve thought about this because it happened to me on a boat that was on fire in the Aegean Sea. I took my passport because identity has become so contentious nowadays, I feel better with my passport. But I could float on one of your sculptures or sit astride it. What was the first piece of art you bought? 

AJ It was a lithograph by Sam Francis, who was showing at the gallery that had given me my first contract – Arthur Tooth & Sons on Bruton Street. I taught art for a couple of years before I was able to live off my paintings, and I taught lithography, so I bought the Sam Francis with my first bit of surplus cash.

CL When did you start living off your paintings?

AJ In 1964. I was 26 when I went to New York, and I was teaching up to the moment I went. But in those days a gallery paid you a monthly stipend, just like being paid by a factory, and at the end of the year either you owed them art or they owed you money.

CL As a child born in Paris, into a very working-class family, we never travelled. I mean, we went to Brittany, where my family is from, and sometimes to visit aunts in another district. My first travel was going to the museum, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, where I had my exhibition. There, as a little boy, suddenly I realised the world was bigger than my neighbourhood. I saw so many civilisations, objects that opened my eyes or my appetite for travel. I wanted to travel to really see things, not as a tourist. Also, in France, every child reads Tintin from the age of five, avidly, for ten years minimum, and Tintin was a reporter who travelled the world. I think as a child I wanted to Tintin-ise my life, somehow. 

But I wondered, I’m sometimes surprised that people see a lot of sexualisation in my work – which is perfectly fine, but I see a lot of other things. For instance, if I use spikes, it’s more a decorative thing than a bondage thing for me. An artist or designer suggests things and then people project onto that. What about you? Your work has often been depicted as very sexual – what is your take on that?

“I look at beauty as a sort of Greek ideal from antiquity, but when Michelangelo is carving his figures, he’s not thinking, this is a guy I’d like to go to bed with. He’s involved with making this surface right” – Allen Jones

AJ There is that parallel reading. If someone is writing about my work, they feel they should take into account the social implications that the work has been used to illustrate, or an editor will tell a writer they have to ask me about sex, because I provided this image at the beginning of my career by showing a woman being treated as an object. There’s nothing I could say for 15 years or more that didn’t sound like an apology. One of the central principles in my work is wanting to make the viewer feel physically involved with the surface, so the paint surfaces I make are very fluid and smooth, and I think they arouse a kind of tactile sense. It’s like looking at a [Jean-Auguste-Dominique] Ingres painting like Madame Moitessier [1851] (3) – the material is painted so perfectly that although you’re not touching it, your senses can feel the velvet as opposed to the cotton. Having a three-dimensional form was a way of wanting to engage the viewer’s sense of touch and, in my head, it makes it more real. I’ve always been attracted to beauty – beautiful women, beautiful men. I look at beauty as a sort of Greek ideal from antiquity, but when Michelangelo is carving his figures, he’s not thinking, this is a guy I’d like to go to bed with. He’s involved with making this surface right.

CL And in your paintings with legs, I’ve never seen a pointed shoe. I was wondering, do you dislike a pointed shoe or is it the fact that the shape of the legs and the arch of the foot always end up kind of short and would look wrong with a point?

AJ You’re right, I seldom point the shoe or really illustrate the toe. It’s very much the athletic shape of the leg and the arched foot, so by the time you’ve got over the instep and you’re down to the toe, it’s then going into the ground as a contour. It’s not that I have anything against the pointed shoe – the illustration is there as much as it’s needed to describe the determination of the foot. 

CL I was thinking it’s very Frederick’s of Hollywood, those catalogues you were mentioning, very short front with a round toe. For me, some shoes are there to dress, some shoes are there to undress, or to keep the nudity correct, and they’re definitely not the same shoes. Clients will come and ask for a nude shoe, just to have the silhouette and the shoe disappear. But you know I was showing these “flesh colour” shoes and someone who was working with me was rightly really pissed off because she is black and she said, “It’s not flesh, it’s beige. This is not my colour.” I apologised to her and it was corrected to cover the different complexions. But I’ve deeply observed in your work that when you are painting legs and the foot, it’s still anatomy. You’re not dressing the body. You’re leaving the body kind of naked because you reveal and you respect, let’s say, the female lines. You’re definitely not dressing.

AJ No. In fact, I’m always undressing. It’s interesting because, when I’m painting figures, usually there is some form of garment on, but I am aware that the garment is simply helping to describe the form.

CL Do you sketch or draw every day? Me, it depends where I am. For instance, Paris is my headquarters, so I don’t have a studio in Paris where I draw. To concentrate, I go to places I’m used to – it can be Brazil, Egypt, Brittany, Portugal, but I have to be in a place where I’m not going to be distracted, and then it becomes a routine. 

“I realised then that I don’t know much, but I know how to sketch a shoe, and I owe that to you, Allen” – Christian Louboutin

AJ I keep all my drawings over the years and they’re a source of inspiration. Sometimes when you’re in between ideas or finished with a thing you’ve been obsessed with, looking through the drawings suddenly sparks something, so I always draw – it’s like doing press-ups, I suppose. 

CL You do press-ups? 

AJ I do 50 press-ups every day. I think if there were an instructor looking, he’d say I was cheating slightly.

When I’m playing with ideas for paintings, I use what I call a storyboard. Rather than turn the page in a notepad, you can scan along and consequently you can play with ideas and see whether you’re going into cul-de-sacs, so I keep these long sheets. For a lifetime almost, I’ve produced the same number of pictures. I’d be lucky if I did 12 paintings a year. I use oil paint, which obviously doesn’t dry quickly, and my way of working is meditative. I use fairly thin paint, so it allows me to glaze, to build up. Even if the paint appears to be opaque, it does have an effect over another colour. A painting can easily take me several months, although I’ll have two or three on the go.

CL I have to say, when I sketch, at the end of the day, whatever I sketch is going to be transformed into a three-dimensional shoe. But if the line of the cleavage is not correct, or if there is a little bit of a bump in the curve, I will redo, redo. It needs to look exactly, actually, like a painting of yours. I’ve looked at your work since I don’t even remember. I’ve met artists, without giving any names, who when they draw a shoe, the proportion is wrong. There is no emotion. There is no sensuality. For instance, I have a friend who’s a fantastic artist who does beautiful miniatures, and then they did a portrait of me holding a shoe, and I was like, “The portrait is beautiful but the shoe is so ugly!” And it’s a very simple thing for me. I realised then that I don’t know much, but I know how to sketch a shoe, and I owe that to you. You are the master of the definition of a great silhouette. I never considered my sketches beautiful, but it gave me some tiny pride that I know how to draw a shoe.

AJ Tell me, what did your family do? 

CL My father was a cabinet-maker, wood carpenter. He worked for a train firm, doing the carpentry of the sofa that was going to be in the next train, for example. He was very detail-orientated. And my mother was very solar – she was all over the place, so amusing, happy, jolly. My father was kind of darker, a little bit sombre, looking at things in the smallest detail. I gave all the credit of how I am to my mother, because she’s a sun. But when they both died, I realised that I’m really a mixture of the two, because for instance, my mother was not detail-orientated at all, she was a mess, and in my work I’m very detailed, which comes from my father. As a child you never think about the importance of the moon, you think of the sun, and yet I see in nature that the moon has a real impact on flowers, how things grow. I say the sun makes it grow but the moon gives the roots. I have the feeling that my roots are my father and I’ve been brightened by my mother. But I realised this all very late.

AJ It’s interesting how those things are taken in subconsciously, and there is this continuity that, however different one’s background might be, you learn by association. My father worked in a metal-box company that made the machines that made tin cans, and so in the [Second World War] he was excused military service because the machines simply started producing shells instead. But he was an amateur watercolourist, and so my earliest memory was standing looking at him while he practised doing washes for the skies. He had books on how to watercolour and my eye level was at table height, watching my father mix up this blue, do two strokes, always overlapping each one from the previous, and then you get this perfect blue sky. I’d see him practising this on Sunday afternoons, his day off. It wasn’t that it was rammed down my throat, it was just there.

CL The layering, that’s you transforming that. I remember we were in your studio looking at some new sculptures, and I said they look very Egyptian, and you told me you’d never thought about that. And then at the end of our dinner, you said, “You know what, I was travelling in Egypt recently … ” To me, it was so obvious, the figures are really sculpted, with something so perennial and reaching perfection, but they are also guardians of an aesthetic, a stable aesthetic – so strong.

AJ Also, in India there are the temples of Khajuraho (4), known for their large erotic carvings, and it was just fantastic to look at these things from a totally different cultural era.

CL Yes, probably 1000 AD.

AJ Being brought up with the European idea where your perception of figures comes from Greece, to see a different perspective was terrific. I liked that they’d been on that wall for centuries and no one’s saying, “We must shield the children’s eyes.” They’re just there and there was something very graceful about it.

CL Look at the nudity in Egypt too. In Egypt, the female figure is always represented dressed, but with a kind of transparency, and you do see the body, you absolutely see the human shapes. I have a house in Luxor, opposite the city by the holy mountain of Ta Dehent, overlooking the river.

AJ The scale in Luxor is just beyond belief. Stone slabs the size of a van, and they were cutting them with string. The time that would take … It’s not by accident that you say something is a pharaonic work when you want to say something is over the top in terms of size. It’s like they wanted to compete with the landscape.

CL Maybe someone’s grandchild was going to see the result of those temples. We don’t think long-term now. It’s like my garden in Brittany – if you want quick results, gardens are probably not for you. You have to plan a garden thinking, this is going to be for the next generation.

1. Christian Louboutin commissioned Allen Jones to create a video artwork for his show L’Exhibition[niste] Chapter II, held in Monaco in 2022 at the Grimaldi Forum. The video showed figures based on Jones’s Body Armour sculptures and wearing Christian Louboutin shoes.
2. Jones’s 1969 Hatstand sculpture was part of a triptych of erotic furniture works that also included Table and Chair, in which women’s bodies were fetishistically reimagined and contorted to function as domestic furniture. 
3. Ingres produced two paintings of the financier’s wife Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier, dated 1851 and 1856. The former, a standing portrait, depicts her in a lustrous black velvet dress. 
4. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments, now a Unesco World Heritage site, was built in Madhya Pradesh between 950 and 1050. The temples’ explicit carvings depicting couples and tantric themes sit side by side with images of daily life, gods and warfare.

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 17 September 2026. Pre-order here.