Shoe Know-how: How to pronounce ‘Louboutin’

With my impending trip to France fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about pronunciation of certain fashion names and how we sometimes struggle to get them right. To a non-native speaker of a given designer’s name, it can sometimes feel like fashion labels are going out of their way to create awkward and hard-to-pronounce brandnames, almost as if they’re made deliberately intimidating to keep the non-experts out of the picture. But often, it’s just a question of saying the word until you get it right.

That’s particularly true for names that the majority of British or American fans habitually say wrongly, reinforcing the incorrect pronunciation among their peers. A good example of this is the name of the King of Heels himself: Christian Louboutin. I have long lost count of all the times I’ve heard even fashion-savvy people refer to him as Christian “Le-BOOT-in” *chringe*.

OK so we may not all be fluent French-speakers, but this one really is no biggie. The name is pronounced as “Loo-bou-TAN”, with the emphasis on the third syllable of the word. This eight second video clip is the perfect pronunciation of the name: