The public and the private: of slippers and smoking jackets

A few years ago, when staying in New York for Old Masters’ Week – my erudite reader will know this occurs in January – I was struck by a man of irreproachable dress wearing upon his feet a pair of house shoes – in the vernacular, ‘slippers’ – in the traditional Albert style.

"I think not, sir:  they appear to have writing on them..."

This is not in or of itself remarkable. I own two pairs myself, both velvet; one a deep red, maintained at the ancestral home in rural Norfolk, the other a pair in midnight blue, worn when at home (and At Home) at Bumwad House, W6. And very practical they are too – the welted leather sole does not collect or transfer fluff, dust or leaf-mold, which appeases Mrs B’s instinctive protectiveness towards our fine carpeting; and, correctly maintained, the pile of the velvet, with its short, rigid fibres, protects the feet from spillages of hot liquids (e.g. Gluehwein) or from the possibly corrosive effect of an inattentively-stirred dry martini.

Nor was it remarkable that the fellow had selected a stout, hard-wearing tweed, of a lovat green base with, if I recall correctly, an orange window-pane over-check – an admirable, if somewhat eccentric, choice of cloth for a shoe. Clearly in this case ‘eccentricity’ or otherwise is relative: wearing a house-shoe is anyway a practice about which we ought not to expect the man on the Clapham omnibus to have fixed or considered views; and if we can't be a little different in the privacy of our home, where can we?

No, what was remarkable was that this fellow was not in his parlour, reclining on a day-bed, with an improving book and a cup of tea, but striding manfully – or as manfully as his footwear would permit – across Fifth Avenue.

In a blizzard.

In broad daylight.

The only other person I know who wears slippers in public is called Angry Dave. Angry Dave is an active and enthusiastic member of Norwich’s open-air wine tasting society, a somewhat exclusive fraternal organisation, much given to bouts of self-fighting and public anguish, usually in the mid-afternoon subsequent to receipt of their giro. A man of certain, if volatile and occasionally incomprehensible, passions, he is often moved to share his thoughts by a passer-by’s refusal to ‘gimme a pound fer a… fer a… cuppa tea… ya fukka…’

Be that as it might. Given the hand which fate has dealt him, and the weighty matters to which he must regularly attend, men like Angry Dave can perhaps be forgiven a certain looseness in their embrace of the customs of normal life. He had always to me seemed something of a unique case – a maverick cocking a snook at society's mores, and whose choice of footwear, every bit as much as his predilection for pissing his trousers in public or wanking near the Edith Cavell memorial, reflects this contempt for convention.

Yet here, in central Manhattan, was an otherwise elegant man, apparently of some considerable means and discrimination; probably en route to a viewing at a dealer or auction house; whose choice of footwear was unlikely to have been made under pressure of time or limited resources. In other words, he was almost certainly not a piss-soaked tramp about to embark on an energetic burst of far-from-discrete self-abuse on the steps of a major public building, and who was in the grips of a cider-fuelled frenzy forced to grab the first shoe-shaped objects as he dashed for the door.


A member of Sotheby's Young Collectors, apparently.

Here was an otherwise normal man who had decided that it was appropriate to wear his slippers in the street.

This was something new indeed!

I was tempted to remark to myself “Tchoh! Only in America!” - but fear of both cliché and prejudice prevented this ejaculation.

My caution was justified some months later, when I noticed, on one of my occasional walks through St James’s, a young gentleman, dressed otherwise as an adult, in the well-built suit, clean shirt and subtle tie typical among the workers of that borough, sporting on his feet a pair of black velvet Alberts, adorned with a skull and crossbone.

This was reinforced, some time after, while waiting at a departure gate at Gatwick airport in high summer, and I glimpsed another young man wearing a pair of dark blue Alberts, similar to my own, as he waited to board his flight for northern Italy. Perhaps, I pondered, the fellow was bound for a spell at the Villa San Pietro as a guest of the Actons, and, frustrated by the demands of airport security, had decided that a slipper was a practical and stylish alternative to the simple loafer. Who knows? Or dares to imagine?

You came here in *those* things? My dear, you're braver than I thought.

Clearly this habit was no longer confined to our cousins on the other side of The Herring Pond, and was, if not yet a pandemic, spreading - like the sub-prime mortgage crisis, TV commercials and nylon stockings.

Now, such items have for donkeys’ years been available from most gentlemen’s outfitters in central London, and latterly available online from such retailers as Shipton & Heneage. They are made by Messrs Bowhill and Elliott of Norwich, whose factory, I believe, supplies most of the London shops. (Their January sale used to be a clever way to pick up beautiful if more or less useless oddities, such as patent dancing pumps with silk bows, for absurdly low prices.) In addition to the better-known boot-makers, they are sold by such general menswear retail outlets as New & Lingwood. I’m sure, if you could bring yourself to cross its threshold, you would find them in Harrods.


The basic Albert house-shoe is available in a bewildering variety of materials and decoration, from the velvet, patent leather and tweed already noted, to plain calf leather and even black suede. Some places will undertake to make them in any practical material you care to supply, and can adorn them with embroidery in gold thread, silk, cotton or what-have-you in almost any design – heraldic, zoological, floral or, if you must, with writing on them.


And, if some of these models could appear slightly naff, most of them can look jolly smart - at the right time and in the right place.

And surely the place for a house shoe is the domestic home.

I hate to be proscriptive (who am I kidding? I love it.) but my suspicion of people who wear their house shoes in public extends also to those who would wear velvet coats - a smoking jacket or the more structured form of dressing gown - outside their own home. This is much more prevalent, and has been influenced by the rash of high street 'masstige' outlets that offer a sort of unhappy compromise between a smoker and the archetypal geography teacher's sports jacket; and places like Favourbrook - once an interesting place, now reduced to the status of purveyors of 'formal-wear' to people for whom a first division footballer's wedding is the acme of sophistication. These garments appear particularly popular with the yocto-celebrity inhabitants of the society pages of Grazia and Heat, particular in the season of Advent.

Indeed, at a Law Society dinner last year I glimpsed a man wearing both house shoes and a smoking jacket. In isolation, there is coherence to this outfit, and jolly fine items all; but, unless the fellow lives in the same block of the Inner Temple (he did not), he had padded around the district dressed as though for his couch, which surely would be grounds for a quiet word from the head of chambers.


Mr Ryder, showing us how it should be done - in the privacy of his home

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In Men at arms, the young Halberdier officers under training in Guy's 'batch' are not permitted to appear in public without their gloves fastened. Any officer seen fastening their gloves on the steps of the mess were liable to be sent back inside to get dressed.

A theme commonly rehearsed by those dissatisfied with contemporary life is that the lines between the public and the private spheres are ever more blurred. To be sure, in the modern world privacy is much harder to maintain, for example amid the rise of social networking, and the ever-greater appetite of our state and our consumer industries for our personal information. This is a regrettable development, not least because so many people happily conspire in that erosion, volunteering almost indiscriminately to part with huge amounts of information about themselves - information that our predecessors would surely have felt were not for public consumption.

Sadly in turn it seems that those happiest not merely to tolerate intrusion but to satisfy and in some cases pre-emptively to exceed the demands, and who seek instead to impose their private selves unbidden upon the public space, are often those who are temperamentally or aesthetically the least suitable to do so. Some things which should remain private are broadcast relentlessly – for the ‘validation’ of self that comes from acknowledgement by ‘peers,’ regardless that acknowledgement is often highly passive – a ‘follower’ on a blog need not do anything, any more than a ‘friend’ on Facebook need discharge the customary reciprocity of hospitality or other wider responsibilities implicit in the term. And when people are happy to make public property of their private space, they feel free to demand the reverse, to impose on the public space standards of conduct suitable only for the private sphere.

Love the cuffs, Manolo - but WTF have you got on your feet?

A logical consequence of this failure - or refusal - to acknowledge boundaries of behaviour is that boundaries of dress are eroded in their wake. Another theme of this blog is that our dress is likely to be an extension or reflection of our private values – and, if it isn’t, it f***ing well ought to be; and that, to an extent, our behaviour is likely to be influenced to some extent by our dress, and other people’s perception of our behaviour almost certainly will be.

So what are we to make of the psychological health of someone who chooses to go shopping in a pink velour tracksuit? What do we deduce about her concern for her fellow citizens, forced to regard her figure in all its undisciplined form? If we are fortunate, her body will not have been excessively ravaged by gravity and time, and we might enjoy, fleetingly, the taut bounce in her buttocks as she pushes her trolley, even if, frankly, ‘she’s not my type’. But more likely she will resemble a deflating carnival balloon pig, and instead of a pert tremor, we will be lucky to emerge from the fleeting confrontation without being confronted by expanses of undergarment; if unluckier still, we will be treated to a view of her arse cleavage, perhaps even, God forbid, of an even more southerly portion.

This is not a typical Juicy Couture customer

And what might we think of the fellow who wears his house shoes in the street - even if that street is as grand as SW1 or Fifth Avenue? We might be thankful that what survives of his sense of discretion permits him to import only his footwear from the private to the public sphere, and that we will be treated to no inadvertent (or deliberate) glimpse of his pants or their contents.

This disregard for boundaries might make him or her feel better, or ‘validated’; but it makes every right-thinking person sick to the stomach. It might allow the man a sense that he is 'different', a daring sartorial pioneer, announcing, like Angry Dave, he is beyond conventional considerations. A man of sounder mind will look at him say 'Look at that frightful ass swanking around in his slippers. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'

Men like thee and me might know where to draw the line, and have no intention of straying further into sartorial anarchy - but can we trust the masses to behave with similar restraint? Just as the average Joe cannot be trusted to control his appetite for self-gratification, leading him inevitably and inexorably to the crack-kitchen, he cannot be expected to control his baser instincts in dress; and must be protected, not by legislation, but by subtle persuasion, from his folly. If we allow men of education and, presumably, some clarity of thought to violate decency in this small way, where do we draw the line? How can we decently upbraid - as we surely must - the slob in his or her leisure wear, their surface area spilling out over the airliner or cinema seat? We need not be as dogmatic as a Halberdier officer, but, if we are to remain sane, the boundaries between public and private must be observed.

Fortunately, the slipper-in-the-street phenomenon is in its infancy, which represents an opportunity that we must seize, before its baby-steps develop into strides, and those less constitutionally equipped to handle autonomy start to wear their pyjamas to work: it can be checked. The passive, exemplary approach is of limited use in these circumstances, and drastic steps are needed. This is no time for sitting idly by as what remains of the higher order goes to Hell in a handcart.

So the next time you see a man padding round Piccadilly in house-shoes, tap him lightly on the shoulder and have a quiet word. Tell him your Uncle Beau sent you.

Pip-pip!