Finishing · 9 years
Daphnée
Repair Specialist
“Every shoe tells a story. My role is to extend that story.”
Digital Twin
Preserving CraftsmanshipThrough Digital Twins
Discover the Christian Louboutin Repair Workshop
The Workshop
A complete reconstruction of the atelier
Rotate, zoom and explore a faithful digital twin of the repair workshop where roughly sixteen thousand pairs are restored each year. Move through the space and meet the artisans who give each shoe a second life.
Workshop · Gaussian Splat~16,000
pairs repaired each year
300–400
shoes restored every week
2–3
weeks average turnaround
3
stages: diagnosis · repair · finishing
Meet the Artisans
The people behind the craftsmanship
Three artisans, three stages of a single repair. Each shoe passes through their hands — from the first diagnosis to the final, invisible finish.
Repair · 12 years
Anthonin
Heel & Sole Specialist
“The structure of a shoe is invisible until it fails. My job is to make sure it never does.”
Static capture
Théo
Diagnosis · 7 years
Théo
Diagnosis & Restoration
“Before you touch a shoe, you have to read it. Everything begins there.”
The Workshop Team
A workshop, captured in full
Every artisan of the atelier was reconstructed as a Gaussian Splat — a faithful digital twin of the team that keeps the craft alive. Select anyone to explore their capture in three dimensions.
The Gesture
Where mastery becomes movement
At the heart of the project lies the gesture itself — captured in motion through dynamic Gaussian Splatting. What looks effortless is the result of years of repetition, judgement and feel.
01 · Anthonin
Repair overview
Dynamic 3D · Gesture
Repair overview
02 · Daphnée
Heel removal
03 · Daphnée
Heel preparation
Dynamic 3D · Gesture
Heel preparation
04 · Théo
Bonding preparation
05 · Théo
Heel bonding
06 · Théo
Securing the heel
07 · Anthonin
Half-sole fitting
Dynamic 3D · Gesture
Half-sole fitting
08 · Anthonin
Half-sole trimming
Artisans' Voices
The craft, told by those who practise it
Across a series of interviews, the workshop's artisans speak about their gesture, their path, learning, and the role a digital companion might play. Short excerpts — browse by person or by theme.
The project teaser
Anthonin Vilfeu
Heel & Sole Specialist
How do you restore a heel to new?
Daphnée Dussaut
Repair Specialist
Mastering your strength: an essential for the cobbler
Gwenaëlle Marziou
Leather goods & stitching
Gwenaëlle Marziou's role at the workshop
Laurent Canale
Workshop Manager
What kinds of repairs are done at the Louboutin workshop?
The Immersive Application
Step inside the atelier
The immersive application places you at the heart of the atelier. You no longer watch the gesture from afar — you are there: you move through the space, circle the artisan, follow every motion as if standing beside them.
01
A presence, in situ
Walk through the workshop rebuilt at 1:1 scale — the bench, the tools, the light. You don't observe a scene: you inhabit the place where the repair comes to life.
02
The gesture from every angle
Gestures captured in Gaussian Splatting replay in full volume. Step closer, circle around, slow them down — you study the movement as no 2D film allows.
03
A know-how that transmits
Up close to the craft, immersion becomes a tool for transmission: review, repeat, understand — so the gesture keeps living.
Enter
The workshop, recreated to walk through
Push the door and move freely through the atelier — the benches, the shelves, the light — reconstructed to scale from the same captures that power this site.
Atelier
Encounter
Meet the artisans
Anthonin and Daphnée welcome you into their space — their words, and their hands at work on a repair.
Meet Anthonin
Anthonin
Repair & finishing
Step into Anthonin's space and watch him at work — fitting and finishing a repair, gesture after gesture.
At work — the gesture
At work — the gesture
Meet Daphnée
Daphnée
Heel preparation
Join Daphnée: her path in her own words, then her hands preparing a heel.
Interview
At work — the gesture
Try it
Experience it for yourself
Want to live the immersive experience in situ? Get in touch to try the application.
From Craftsmanship to Digital Twin
Why this project exists
Capturing a workshop is not about replacing the artisan. It is about protecting a living memory — so that gestures refined over a lifetime can be transmitted, taught and extended long into the future.
1Workshop
2Artisan
3Gesture
4Knowledge
5Digital Twin
01
Knowledge Preservation
Capturing expertise before it disappears — recording the gestures and judgement of master artisans as a living archive.
02
Training
Supporting future generations of artisans with an immersive, repeatable reference that no manual could ever hold.
03
AI Assistance
Building future intelligent assistants grounded in real expert knowledge, not generic instruction.
04
Sustainability
Extending the life of every product through repair and the transmission of know-how — the most sustainable luxury of all.
Behind the Scenes
Making the invisible visible
How do you capture, understand and pass on a gesture built on experience and intuition? That question gave birth to this digital twin.
The genesis
From a simple question
Born from a collaboration between Maison Christian Louboutin, EY Studio+ and Institut Polytechnique de Paris (Télécom SudParis), and unveiled at VivaTech 2026, the project starts from a simple observation: craft knowledge is tacit and hard to document. It passes through the hands, rarely through words. In the repair workshop — nearly 16,000 pairs a year, where every shoe is a unique case — that knowledge lives in the gesture of a few artisans. The ambition: to make a faithful, lasting digital double of it.
On the ground
Three moments for a double
An immersion in the workshop, to observe the key gestures — sole protection, resoling, heel repair. A 4D capture, frame by frame, that freezes movement in three dimensions. And interviews with the artisans — apprentices, experts, workshop manager — about their path, their relationship to the gesture, what passes on and what resists transmission.
The repair workshop
The 4D capture of the gesture
The interviews with the artisans
Why 3D
What a video can't say
A video offers a single viewpoint. A photo, a frozen instant. Yet the gesture is spatial: it lives in the meeting of hand, tool, material, pressure and angle. Only a three-dimensional capture preserves that reality — you can move around it, choose your view, lean in on the hands, slow it down, see what a single camera would hide. Where conventional VR explores a static set, here understanding comes through movement. Where industrial digital twins model a machine, this one models human know-how.
Perspectives
Extending the life of the gesture
Once the gesture becomes data, it becomes a foundation. It can be passed on — training apprentices, saving time —, make the craft more attractive and draw new talent, augment the gesture with a digital assistant, feed an AI able to render its precision, and above all durably archive the living heritage of the Maisons. Repair extends the life of the shoe — the most sustainable luxury. The digital twin extends the life of the gesture.
Preserving CraftsmanshipThrough Immersive Digital Twins
A collaboration between
- EY Studio+
- Institut Polytechnique de Paris
- Télécom SudParis