Look is warm, the trend is fuzzy
IN PUBLIC? Furry jury out on women stepping out in bedroom slippers
“The fun thing about subway dressing is, it represents life’s rich tapestry.”
HAMISH BOWLES, VOGUE
NEW YORK— You see them all the time lately, grown women who look as if they dressed for work and then walked out of the house and forgot their shoes. On the A train at 42nd Street, a woman in a business suit stood reading the business reports on her iPad, on her feet fur slippers as big as plates.
Outside Bloomingdale’s, another woman, with one foot on the curb and the other in the gutter, hailed a taxi. She pointed her toe delicately, or as delicately as one can with feet encased in rubber-sole Swirl Furry slippers. Sauntering through the Union Square Greenmarket, a woman carrying a jaunty French straw market bag wore a pair of pink Steve Madden fuzzy slipper boots that looked as if made from the pelt of a Wookie.
Uggs got here long ago, of course, and yet much as those eyesores have done to make the world an uglier place, this trend can’t be blamed entirely on Australia. Phoebe Philo had a hand in it, too. Anyway, she makes an obvious culprit. It was Philo whose Celine show for spring 2013 featured shoes that looked as if created for Elmo to wear for a night out with Justin Vivian Bond.
The fuzzy pumps and shower shoes in Philo’s Celine show were startling enough for The Huffington Post to call them out as “Really Really Weird.”
Was Philo flouting good taste? Or was she merely responding — the way Rei Kawakubo, the Comme des Garcons designer, once did with her notorious padded hump collection — to something already hidden in plain sight?
In Kawakubo’s case, it was a response to the silhouettes inadvertently created by the stuff people routinely sling around their bodies: rucksacks, Snuglis, fanny packs. In Philo’s, it was to a stealthily subversive tendency on the part of fashion to erode the lines between public and domestic life.
Saggers, slip dresses, lingerie worn as outerwear, pyjamas on the street, bed head, Crocs and the dreaded Adidas shower shoes are all examples of the ways a once sharp division between how we dress at home and present ourselves on the street has blurred, probably forever. The days of a hat and gloves for town are gone with the dodo.
So it should not be surprising that a mini-trend previously confined to students at private girls’ schools, the tendency to wear fuzzy bedroom slippers out on the street, has suddenly and unexpectedly crossed over to the adult population.
“It’s all about comfort,” Hamish Bowles, international editor at large for Vogue, said before a recent private screening of the HBO documentary In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“The fun thing about subway dressing is, it represents life’s rich tapestry,” said Bowles, who has a pronounced fondness for slipper-like velvet pumps. “You see the man in black tie whose driver presumably didn’t show up, and you see innovative street kids, although not quite enough of those. And you see sheepskin slippers.”
To Bowles’s eye, the sight of a woman in business garb and shearling slippers is preferable to that of one in business clothes and running shoes: “It hints at naughtiness of some sort and sleeping under the desk.”
That particular look started during a long subway strike and, as editors in the HBO documentary assert, became unfortunate shorthand among European style types for American hopelessness. “It was like a joke,” one editor said. Fleecy slippers may be a joke, too. But is it an intentional one?
“No! Ca, c’est pas possible,” Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, another Vogue fashion editor at the screening, said when shown phone snaps of a woman in Grizzly Paw furry slippers (complete with “claws”) sauntering down Fifth Avenue. Translation: It’s impossible. But, actually, no: It’s a fact. “Ca, c’est no way!” Cerf de Dudzeele added, using a saltier phrase unlikely to appear in these pages. “What? You cannot find something else to wear and be comfortable?”