Why the slipper is set to be this season’s definitive men’s shoe

In the gamut of men’s footwear, there has always been a particular loucheness to the slipper: the Albert slipper, named after Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria, was designed for men of the 19th century to move from dinner table to smoking room without damaging rugs or carpets with the dirt and soot of the street. Oftentimes in velvet – to match tuxedos and smoking jackets – they came to symbolise the suave and the urbane, resurging in midcentury Hollywood among its light-footed leading men.

Another half-century on, the men’s slipper looks set for ubiquity once again. Earlier this month, I was talking to the founder of a London-based skatewear label (and one of fashion’s most influential figures), who told me that he was currently fixated on the slipper: in particular, those produced by the French shirtmaker Charvet on Paris’ storied Place Vendôme, around the corner from The Ritz. Cut from soft suede with their own matching carry case, they are the essence of simplicity: a slip-on style with gently cushioned sole, embossed with the looping Charvet emblem as if a particularly luxurious hotel slipper. He was trying to make his way through every colour, which span classic brown, tan and navy, as well as powdery blue, pink and sanguine red.

Prior to that, Jason Hughes – fashion and creative director of Wallpaper* – had noted to me that the slipper was his shoe of the season, and all he planned to wear during the womenswear shows this past September (a rainy evening on the cobbles of Milan did momentarily highlight the occasional impracticality of the style). His slippers of choice: Prada’s slick, glossy leather mules, which appeared on the house’s menswear runway for A/W 2024 (and returned in a tasselled version for S/S 2025), or a Manolo Blahnik slip-on in mock croc. Another friend, who works at a British heritage house, recently told me he wanted to rough up a pair of the brand’s signature classic velvet slippers – complete with embroidered crest – and wear them on a night out with torn jeans.

If that makes for ‘two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend’, then there was plentiful evidence on the runway, too: at JW Anderson’s A/W 2024 menswear show – which drew inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut – boys wore tasselled slippers with just-sheer tights and socks (as with much of Jonathan Anderson’s output, the result was gleefully strange). The aforementioned Prada mules were part of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ subversive riff on the corporate uniform (guests entered the show through a simulacrum of a nondescript office space), while at Balenciaga, Demna presented a typically twisted take on the slipper, which appeared like a uniform-issue work loafer had been stamped down at the back (they were worn with ballooning track pants).

And despite what might seem like a shift away from the Albert slipper’s formal origins, these new iterations of the style nonetheless come with a suggestion of elegance – even when worn with baggy jeans or trackpants (there is something eternally appealing about the juxtaposition of formality and slouchiness, which conjures off-duty starlets and days after the night before). It makes the slipper a shoe of low effort, high reward, requiring the wearer to simply slip it onto the foot and go – without so much as having to tie up a pair of laces.

Men’s slippers: the Wallpaper* picks

Prada

‘Glossy perfection – best worn poking out from beneath a pair of baggy blue jeans’