The History of First Slipper, Until the late 19th century, the term could be used to describe any indoor shoe that slipped on to the foot, including ballroom slippers (think Cinderella’s glassy numbers), bathroom slippers, bedroom slippers and afternoon tea slippers. Nowadays, we use the word to mean footwear that is only to be worn in the home. Whatever the definition, its history is an absorbing proposition. Slippers were worn in Chinese courts as early as 4700 BC. They would be made out of cotton or woven rush, had leather linings, and were adorned with symbols of power, such as dragons. Native American moccasins were also highly decorative. Hand painted to depict scenes from nature and embellished with beadwork and fringing, their soft sure-footedness made them suitable for indoors appropriation.
Inuit and Aleut people would make shoes from smoked hare hide to protect their feet against the frozen ground inside their homes. Conversely, the discerning Victorian gentleman was in need of a pair of ‘house shoes’ in order to keep the dust and gravel outside – much better than ruining his expensive rug and beautifully polished floor.
Embroidered slippers presented Victorian ladies (on both sides of the Atlantic) with an opportunity to show off their needlepoint skills. Magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Peterson’s Magazine contained patterns so that the latest fashions could be recreated in the home; a perfect gift for a loved one, and an ideal way to entice a man with an eye for embroidery.
The emergence of a slipper industry grew from the warehouse floor of the felt industry in northeast England. Workers would make themselves footwear from the scraps that were left over, and from this seed grew the businesses of John William Rothwell, Samuel McLerie and other commercial retailers in the late 1800s. Though the advent of heating and descent into everyday casualness may have led slipper sales to decline since the 1950s it doesn’t make them any less interesting, or snug! Read on for tales of notable styles, The History of First Slipper from those worn by Kanye West to the Pope.
The word ‘slipper’ was first recorded in English in 1478, however it seems the slipper has been around for much longer. It turns out Spanish cave drawings that date back to more than 15,000 years ago illustrate humans wearing animal skin and animal fur around their feet, what one would assume was a make-do shoe or slipper for the time. At Boscombe Down, roman bodies have been in the process of being dug up for the last fifteen years, so you might expect that if anything interesting was going to be found it would have been found by now. However, in 2008, a peculiar unearthing made headlines. The focal point of a body that was unearthed in 2008 was interestingly not the poignant fact that she was curled up with a child, but rather the fact that she had been buried in her slippers. This suggests slippers go all the way back to 200AD. It is believed her slippers indicate her high social status, as the majority of the remaining 300 bodies there were wearing traditional boots (for their journey into the next life).
