Worldwise: Famed French Fashion Designer Christian Louboutin’s Favourite Things
3 min
As the founder of an eponymous fashion brand that counts legions of women and celebrities as ardent fans, Christian Louboutin has amassed a following that has garnered him fame in his own right. Most known for his stilettos with their unmistakable red-lacquered soles—the accessory that gave him his start—the Paris-born designer has since expanded beyond footwear with handbags, fragrances, makeup, and shoes for men.
Now comes a new venture all together: this April, Louboutin, 60, will open Vermelho Melides, a 13-room hotel in Melides, a small town in Portugal’s Alentejo region. It’s a rural, unspoiled destination of pine forests, rice lagoons, and beaches where he owns a restored former fisherman’s shack and visits every chance he gets.
Named after the Portuguese word for red, Vermelho Melides is meant to evoke the feeling of a friend’s home more than a hotel and features a litany of colors, materials, and styles from various eras. Art plays into the design, too, while dining and imbibing will unfold at XTian, a restaurant offering upscale Portuguese cuisine.
Louboutin, who was expelled from school three times and began designing shoes when he was a teenager, spoke to Penta about his favorite things from Rio de Janeiro, where he was attending Carnival and also has a home.
I first discovered Portugal… as a teenager on a backpacking trip. I traveled to Lisbon and Porto and instantly loved both. I went again eight years later—this time to Comporta, a small town about an hour south of Lisbon. It was idyllic and had the most beautiful stretch of beach. I didn’t visit again until almost a decade later. I had already started my company, and my friend, the designer Jacques Grange, invited me to stay with him at his home there. I ended up visiting for the next two summers and eventually bought a home in Comporta and then Melides.
My ideal day in Melides… begins by waking up at 7 a.m., going for a jog and jumping into the ocean for a swim. Then it’s breakfast with my friends and family. The rest of the day is very relaxed. I have a beautiful garden and might spend a few hours tending to my flowers and vegetables. Or it’s reading, sketching my next round of shoe designs, and visiting local markets. But really, being in Melides is about not doing much. In the evening, it’s a long dinner with friends at home or at a local restaurant.
A favourite souvenir from Melides is… a ceramic piece from the store Vida Dura in town. Everything is handmade in Portugal, and the owner has a fantastic eye for great finds. The dinnerware, jugs, glasses, and more are colourful and will remind you of your trip.
My most memorable hotel stay… was at Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, India, in the Maharani suite. It’s a sprawling palace and gorgeous with Art Deco decor. My bed was huge, and so was the bathroom. More recently, it’s the Le Grand Controle on the grounds of Versailles. I went for Valentine’s Day with my boyfriend, and the property transported us to the world of French royalty. Alain Ducasse is behind the cuisine, and we had the most decadent multi-course with lots of French wine.
The destination on my bucket list is… the Azores Islands in Portugal. The architecture looks stunning, and it’s very much about appreciating nature like Melides. I want to visit Tasmania for the same reason.
My go-to vacation destination is… Bhutan. I visit every year. It’s a very spiritual place and again, nature dominates. I also love hiking, and the country has incredibly scenic hikes.
The shoes I wear for sightseeing are… loafers or flip-flops. I find them to be comfortable and easy to take on and off. Never sneakers, which I wear only when I’m running.
My travel essentials are… a great book and auction catalogs from Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams—they’re my secret vice.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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