Jaden Smith Unveils Christian Louboutin Men's Fall 2026 Collection: Well Red

Please excuse the hackneyed newspaper riddle: Jaden Smith’s debut collection as men’s creative director of Christian Louboutin is black, white and red all over. It’s also focused primarily on classic leather footwear, not sneakers, although his penny loafers are as perforated as SpongeBob, or engineered as slingbacks; his patent evening pumps sometimes swell to nearly clownish proportions, and his cowboy boots are finished with fancy silver-toe caps. “His brand is really about handmade leather craftsmanship, and I wanted to honor that,” Smith said of Louboutin. The American rapper and actor took over a raw, concrete space and installed a sprawling exhibition where shoes on plinths mingled with a mound of cathode-ray-tube TV sets, interactive light boxes, toppled classical columns, an antique wooden contraption he described as “the first 3D glasses” — and his fall collection, displayed on shelves inside a giant, red exploding head. Known for his sometimes kooky antics on social media, Smith was all business on Wednesday morning, sharing some of his thoughts as Louboutin opened his red-soled universe to new creativity, roughly 15 years after expanding into men’s categories. There were some out-there designs, including the quilted armadillo-like boots and black utility harness Smith wore as he guided a visitor around the installation. Ditto the Chewbacca-esque boots in shaggy red hair, and combat boots dunked in red, black or white goo. Overall, this felt like a slate-cleaning exercise since Smith also tweaked and streamlined some familiar shoe and boot models — adding a stenciled logo on the heel here; opting for a matte finish there. Indeed, his relatively unadorned skate shoes, wrestling boots and low-top basketball sneakers, ever so gently padded, might beckon a wider customer base, given the brand’s prior associations with spikes and shark-tooth soles. Smith unearthed a smiling portrait of a young Louboutin and put it front and center, overlaying it with red, as he did his face — and many elements of the exhibition. “He’s my main inspiration,” Smith said. “I really just want to learn from him and take the past of to create the future of what Louboutin could be.” He imbued his creations with storytelling, sometimes playfully — like a little silver paint brush that could wipe dust off shoes, or unearth some archaeological treasure — and sometimes inscrutably. The backstory for his hole-punched loafers? “It’s about humanity’s connection to nature and being able to feel the wind, the temperature and atmosphere through your shoes,” he said. “Usually shoes are to protect you from the outside, but I wanted to kind of blur the line of what shoes are.” His harnesses and backpacks with multiple, zippered pockets demarcating spaces for a phone, hard drive, pencils and pills? “It’s kind of a new dress code we refer to as TCT formal, where it’s more of a tactical dress code where you have a lot of utility and pockets and kind of tactical behavior happening.” And the basis of his design philosophy? “Quantum physics and mechanics, like the dead cat experiment where we don’t know what’s going on in spaces that we can’t see into,” he said. “But we do know that atoms and very small molecules change when they’re being observed. And that idea is the basis of a lot of my design philosophy and a lot of my designs.” To be sure, he covered a lot of ground, from flip-flops and moon boots to “gorpcore” drawstring shoes, and impressed with his varied and youthful experimentation.