Inside Jaden Smith’s First Men’s Collection for Christian Louboutin

What happens when a debut refuses the safety of spectacle and instead insists on substance?

At Paris Fashion Week Men’s, that’s exactly what we found out.

American singer, actor and more recently the new creative director of Maison Christian Louboutin, Jaden Smith chose to express his vision with weight- literal, historical and symbolic and all black, white, and red.

On January 21, inside a raw, concrete Parisian space overtaken by red light and relics of the past, Maison Christian Louboutin unveiled to Esquire India, Smith’s first Men’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection as a sprawling, immersive exhibition. And the accent unmistakably was on leather.

Shoes were transformed into objects of study: penny loafers punctured with deliberate perforations; patent evening pumps swelling toward the surreal; cowboy boots tipped with ornate silver caps. The familiar Louboutin codes were present, but stripped back, stretched, and recalibrated.

Conceived as a gradual revelation across a series of spaces, the exhibition honours the legacy of Christian Louboutin Men while offering an initial vision of its future.

“This collection is inspired by the history of working men throughout the centuries, The Stone Masons, The Scribes, The Doctors. It’s Inspired By The Lost Epochs Of Time & Made By Hands Born From Stars Forged Under Immense Pressure Deep In Cosmic Space,” said Smith of Louboutin.

Christian Louboutin

He also positioned the new phase of the brand through the lens of photography and cinema, central to his own creative language and rooted in France’s role as their birthplace. The exhibition recalled 19th-century experiments in which light and movement shaped identity. Articulated through an intergenerational perspective, the collection opened a dialogue between past, present, and future, inviting visitors into an intimate encounter with Jaden Smith’s singular vision.

And that vision was?

Some out-there designs, including the quilted armadillo-like boots and black utility harness Smith wore as he guided visitors 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.

Christian Louboutin

Of course, Hip-hop culture hovered subtly throughout. The Trapman silhouette nodded to the 1990s, a decade that shaped Smith’s visual universe, while translating its codes into something formal, architectural, future-facing. Elsewhere, the Corteo re-emerged as a symbol of discipline and presence: a shoe for men defined by intention, labour and repetition. Loafers appeared in triplicate: classic, slingback, sandal while the TCT I (short for Tactical) proposed functionality as a new form of elegance, imagining footwear as the equivalent of a waterproof technical jacket.

Beyond the shoes, the exhibition widened into a meditation on image-making itself. A 360-degree installation of vintage television screens stitched together moments from different eras — world events, domestic scenes, fragments of the everyday — underscoring how images quietly shape identity over time. Styles were displayed atop antique columns referencing the allegory of the Virgin Weeping over a Broken Column, a poetic reminder that knowledge, like craftsmanship, is inherited.

Photography that was central to Smith’s creative language appeared in a series of hand-developed images produced using early techniques. Created under cloth, with silver and chemical solutions, the photographs felt devotional in their slowness. Some appeared as red-illuminated negatives, a direct echo of Louboutin’s signature sole. A red anamorphosis installation followed, requiring viewers to shift position to see clearly — an invitation to reconsider perspective itself.

One of the most intimate gestures came in the form of an Angel sculpture from Christian Louboutin’s personal collection, featured in the first shoot with Smith. Positioned quietly within the exhibition, it became a symbol of creative lineage and trust was a guardian of shared curiosity between founder and successor.

The presentation closed with the exploded red head installation, housing the final selection of shoes and acting as the exhibition’s focal point. It was a controlled, deliberate ending to a debut that avoided excess.

An avant-première capsule launches January 22 in select boutiques and on christianlouboutin.com, ahead of the full Men’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection arriving in stores in June. Executed in red, black and white, the capsule introduces key silhouettes while reinforcing the direction of Smith’s first season.

For a high-profile appointment, the approach was notably measured. Jaden Smith’s debut at Christian Louboutin Men was like resetting the category around leather, craft and edited design.