“I was shocked and surprised when Christian reached out to me. But I was even more surprised about how much we clicked. I think that Christian trust me. And I trust in his belief in me.” So said Jaden Smith during a preview tour of his debut collection as Christian Louboutin’s first-ever men’s creative director.
Smith, 27, and Louboutin, 62, first met at a Paris Fashion Week event back in 2019. They stayed in irregular contact until Louboutin was inspired by Smith’s “rich and multidimensional” frame of reference to offer him the job. That was sometime early in 2025, and development of this first collection began around nine months ago.
When the news of the appointment broke last September, a cross-section of the contemporary commentariat clustered to condemn it: It was Smith’s celebrity parentage and lack of formal cordwainer training that offended them. Smith says: “sometimes because people who don’t have a formal training don’t understand the rules, they paint outside of the box in weird ways. Because they don’t know where the boxes are.”
Louboutin has already stated that part of his rationale in hiring Smith was to broaden his brand’s generational appeal. And for sure the MSFTsrep founder’s 18-point-something million Instagram follower count would have cemented that appeal.
Yet Smith is no opportunist dilettante. One of his first acts after accepting the job was to go on a road trip around the factories in Campania, Italy, where Louboutin’s menswear production, which generates around a quarter of his revenue—is centered. He says the tradition of craft and culture of family-nurtured expertise he discovered there “gave me a real appreciation and understanding, and changed the way I look at shoes and fashion.”
His design instincts, meanwhile, lean towards hybridizing categories. There is a black patent, split-toe penny loafer, the Plato, that has been constructed with a slide-style slingback strap that Smith imagines being worn from the boardwalk to the boardroom. There is a webbing-clad black chelsea boot that he visualizes trekking directly from the walking trail to a formal event. And there is a black cowboy boot style boot whose shaft is printed with a crowd scene shot in Paris by his friend Moises Arias that Smith characterizes as suitable both as a snake boot and for lounge lizards. A formal evening shoe has been perforated with Swiss cheese holes in order to give the wearer as many options as he has socks. There are faux fur boots in Louboutin red and slouchy moon boot hiker hybrids.
Along with this varied footwear footprint, Smith has also worked on a broad accessories range that includes duffels, belts, paintbrush-attached chrome keychains, and other sundries. His 12 pocket leather backpack, with each pocket carefully stamped with its designer’s intended category of contents, is a key piece in what Smith calls the “TCT Formal” aesthetic he is working to establish in this collection.
Jaden Smith says: “I feel like fashion is all about expressing yourself: radical expression through art.” He adds: “And all I can say about myself is that I’m really honored to be here, and I’m blessed and I’m happy. I’m going to do the best that I can do with the opportunities that I have.”
