Slipshod no more: The slipper has made its way out of the bedroom and into the world of high fashion

My father had a party-prep ritual. When there was a hard-card event to attend or black tie to wear, Dad would go to the bathroom first, shaving and showering and primping before attending to his freshly pressed shirt and tricky gold cufflinks. As my mother busied herself with Clairol hot roller curlers and industrial blasts of Elnett, her mink coat unsheathed from its dust cover, Dad would make his way downstairs in what I came to know as his ‘pre-party pants’ — an ensemble that actually involved no trousers at all.

Dad’s hair was brilliantined and his chin cleanly shaved (perhaps with a corner of loo roll mopping up the blood from a wayward Wilkinson Sword nick). His shirt would be buttoned up and his tie knotted small, tight and perfectly. Cufflinks in place, Omega watch on. Over the top of all this, a silk Tootal dressing gown, rakishly tied at the waist. With his suit pants still enjoying a hot crease in the electric Corby press, his legs would be bare but for a pair of black, calf length socks.

On his feet? The most immaculate pair of house slippers available to man. Church’s. Tan leather heel and sole. Mandarin red oxblood uppers. Cut in from a Moroccan block. Buttery soft and worn-in just so, their back quarters high on his ankle, effecting the overall look a slightly effeminate, dainty and camp air, à la Noël Coward in Jamaica.

This was how Dad dressed to fix himself a secret pre-party sharpener — a Gordon’s gin and tonic, ice and a slice — and he’d sit in front of the television, tumbler in hand, elegant slippers on, sans pants, waiting for his wife to descend, enjoying a bit of peace before the noisy socials began.

It turns out my father and his transitional footwear were trendsetters. Several decades on, the evening slipper seems to be having its time again. Not only for parties and black-tie events, but for daywear and work; the dance floor, but also the pavement and parlour.

The most coveted models are acquired on holiday — the super-chic extra-baggage booty shipped back from a visit to India, Morocco, Italy, Spain or France. Countries and cultures have their own variants; the cotton-upper and sisal-soled espadrille on the Côte d’Azur, as worn by Picasso and Yves Saint Laurent, itself descended from the original Catalàn and Basque peasant staple, espardenya (literally ‘sparto grass’, a nod to the material used for the sole), from about 2000BC. These Euro-basics were themselves influenced by the cotton or woven rush Chinese Xiuhuaxie or Buxie slippers, which date from 4700BC.

Go to Tangier or Marrakech for a long weekend and it is de rigueur to come home with a pair of orange or pink leather Babouche slippers (at a keenly haggled £10 or £20 in the Essaouira souk, where Mick and Keith got their Babouches back in the 1960s, quite a bit cheaper than Church’s). A visit to Delhi or Mumbai requires the purchase of Indian slippers in the Mojari, Khussa or Jutti style.

Right now, the world’s slip-on capital is Venice, where the traditional Gondolier’s Furlane scarpet, water-born in the 19th century, is having another fashion moment on terra firma. Invented for land-lubbers, the humble Furlane shoe (or friulane or even papusse) was actually the creation of crafts-people in the Friuli region of north-east Italy.

The rubber-soled shoe (material recycled from old car and bicycle tyres) was handmade in velvet and distinguished by a pointy vamp detail adopted by Venetian canal workers during the Second World War. Cheap, sciccoso and slip-resistant whatever the surface (ebony wooden deck or wet cobbled streets), the Furlane slipper has now found its way onto the feet of the style mavens. Back in 2017, Kate Moss swapped her beloved ballet flats for scarlet Furlanes from the ViBi Venezia store owned by the Arrivabene sisters, Viola and Vera of the grand Palazzo Papadopoli in Venice. The boutique, founded in 2015, makes collections inspired by the founders’ blue-blooded mother, Countess Bianca di Savoia Aosta Arrivabene, who had been buying the traditional slippers on the city’s famous Rialto Bridge for decades.

Fellow Italophiles George Clooney, Alexa Chung and Tom Ford have caught on to the trend: Venice is now a slipper shoppers’ paradise, with makers such as Scarosso, Piedàterre Venezia (‘the original Venetian slippers since 1952’) and RivoAltus offering their own multicoloured takes on the gondoliers’ classic. At the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in June, male guests, including Orlando Bloom, Theo James and Leonardo DiCaprio, wore blue velvet ViBi Venezia scarpet, as the mostly high-heeled ladies — Kim Kardashian, Sydney Sweeney and Oprah Winfrey, all arguably in greater need of ship-to-shore stability — were short changed and possibly imperilled by knock-off versions from the Amazon site.

Last summer, the city slipper came to Britain, too. The Furlane, sometimes styled with a Mary Jane strap, is now a dinner-jacket and pavilion staple all over the country. Perhaps a reaction to clompy, clod-hopping seasons of chunky, unflattering footwear — and too many summers of open-toed, Hobbity, corpus unguis-exposing Birkenstocks and city flip-flops — the Furlane is an elegant, adaptable alternative.

Of course, the Brits — particularly, cigar-smoking, hard-carding males — have been slouching their way around big tents and ballrooms in velvet slippers for ages, often with gold embroidery on each toe. Yet the apparel category itself has much less highfalutin’ associations.

The English word slippers occurs from about 1478, its first recorded use appearing in a translation of the Fardle of facions conteining the aunciente maners, customes and lawes, of the peoples enhabiting the two partes of the earth, called Affricke and Asie by the 16th-century German humanist Johann Boemus. A key chapter titled ‘Of Turcquie, and of the maners, Lawes, and Ordenaunces of the Turcques’ contains this prescriptive statement of etiquette. ‘House, or Churche, or any other place wher they entende to sitte, no man entreth with his shoes on. For it is compted a very dishonest and an vnmanerly facion, to sitte shoed. Wherfore they vse a maner of slippe shooes, that may lightly be putte of and on.’

In King Lear, Shakespeare muddied the manners by suggesting that going ‘slipshod’ was most suitable for persons with ‘kibes’ (chilblains). Eventually, however, it was probably a particular style of jacket that begat (and gentrified) the slip-on shoe in blazing Blighty.

Designed in the 1850s, in the style of a short robe de chambre, the traditional smoking jacket, in velvet or silk, has a shawl collar, sports turn-up cuffs and is closed with militaristic frogging fastenings or a tie belt, the garment’s specific intention being male and lounge-centric—men tugging on clay pipes or cheroots. Diarist Samuel Pepys was an early adopter, writing in 1666 ‘and so to Hale’s and there sat until almost quite dark upon working my gowne, which I hired to be drawn (in) it—an Indian gown, and I do see all the reason to expect a most excellent picture of it’. The velvet gown needed an appropriately relaxed shoe to match—sturdy, bulky footwear being too stiff for prolonged inhalation sessions. This was still a concern more than a century on. Thus, the velvet slipper, made by needlepointers and influenced by what was then a fashion for Orientalism, was born under Queen Victoria. Her consort, Prince Albert, commissioned the items to be worn around the Royal Household and a new formalwear accessory category, ‘the Prince Albert slipper’, was created. A century later, a generation of Sloane Rangers would follow in the Prince’s soft footsteps.

Jeremy Hackett, co-founder of the eponymous menswear outfitters, recalls his store’s 1980s origins as a pair of secondhand-clothes shops in Covent Garden and on the New King’s Road. The store in Neal Street, WC2, sold vintage footwear by British makers such as Wildsmith, George Cleverly and Lobb. ‘Our shop was opposite a famous punk club called The Roxy,’ Jeremy recalls. ‘Before the Sloanes caught on to them, punk rockers — then mutating into New Romantics — would come in searching for velvet slippers like ones they’d seen worn by Cecil Beaton and Oscar Wilde in old photographs. We sold literally hundreds of pairs.’ Artist David Hockney (now a Crocs devotee) bought Hackett corduroy slippers in several colours. ‘He wore them in his studio, for painting in.’

These days, Jeremy is a velvet-slipper guy himself, adopting the soft footwear for black-tie occasions — as The Prince of Wales did at the royal premiere of Top Gun: Maverick. Himself an RAF ‘top gun’ pilot, The Prince wore custom Crockett & Jones numbers embroidered with F-18 fighter jets. Still, Jeremy caveats the look with some rules. ‘They look best with a double-breasted dinner jacket,’ he advises, ‘although a tartan jacket goes well with a slipper, too.’ At a push, the designer will allow a jeans-and-Furlane combo, ‘but always with socks’. ‘A nicely turned, slender ankle and a pair of velvet slippers calls for decent hosiery,’ he insists. ‘Black tie and bare ankles is just wrong.

‘Monogramming the toes with skull and crossbones is,’ he warns, ‘also a bit of a pose.’ You can order British-made day slippers bespoke at Hackett’s tailor, at No 14, Savile Row, W1, or off the peg at Tricker’s, Edward Green or New & Lingwood, all on Jermyn Street, SW1.

Chelsea and Mayfair leather man Trevor Pickett has added his own, Prince Albert-shaped iteration of the slipper, each one made out of kilim weave, no two pairs the same. ‘Slipshod’ is no longer a dirty word.