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…