Slipping the velvet
Nick Foulkes says that velvet slippers are the new trainers impeccably tailored Italian of my acquaintance told me the most remarkable piece of news: Flavio Briatore had been seen out and about wearing slippers. He imparted this news to me with the full gravity that others might reserve for such trivia as the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or the exact details of Iran's nuclear programme I shared his concern and my mind ran not with visions of a care-inthe-community-style Flavio shambling around the streets not just in his slippers but with a dressing-gown and a set of striped flannel pyjamas.
However, there was not a hint of the day-care room about the Formula One tsar's look. Admittedly it was in Les Caves du Roy in St Tropez, where even I would not dare to wear my string-waisted pyjamas; instead he was impeccably clad in the uniform of the private jet set: expensively faded and tastefully torn denim jeans worn with a shirt open a few more buttons than is normal St James's (but just right for St Trop).
And yes, slippers are indeed a part of the Flavio look. Flavio has a clothing brand called Billionaire, which showcases the design talents of one Angelo Galasso, and since becoming a fashion boss as well as nightclub impresario and motor-racing boss, Flavio has taken to wearing the sort of velvet slippers that are traditionally worn by gouty old codgers in BBC TV period dramas who dress for dinner each night in their stately homes.
The story is that the anglophile Galasso felt that there was a place for these shoes in the Billionaire wardrobe, embroidered with the logo of course, never dreaming that they would become a dance-floor favourite. 'Flavio wore them in his Sardinian nightclub Billionaire, cult location for international VIPs,' explains Galasso helpfully, 'and because they are really comfortable they have become a fashion item, indeed the trend is to wear them with a blazer, perhaps with torn jeans. The matching has to be very sober,' he cauknew something was up when an 1 tions, 'therefore the colour has to be either black, or dark brown, or burgundy with the logo in aged silver.' Thinking on his feet, so to speak, Galasso started taking orders for bespoke velvet slippers personalised with the wearer's zodiac sign.
Traditionally such shoes are embroidered with some crest or heraldic device to enhance the ancestral verisimilitude. I have a wonderful pair, bespoke, from Maxwell's, black with a black calf interior and decked out with a very handsome cipher in gold thread — not mine, I must add, but ordered then not collected by some customer, and picked up by me in a sale some years ago. They fit perfectly and it tickles me Tyrian pink to be wearing someone else's fancy initials, and whenever I wear them I bore everybody by telling them it was the best hundred quid I ever spent. However, I would never wear them out of the house, and this is where I seem to have been making a fashion faux pas.
This year my friends with children in their late teens and early twenties have been telling me that more than anything for Christmas young men did not want the latest iPod or cameraphone/MP3 player; instead the hot gift was a pair of velvet slippers embroidered with a skull and crossbones. Nowadays the Jolly Roger is ubiquitous, appearing on everything from Ralph Lauren dress shirt studs to Alexander McQueen scarves, and I was pleased to learn that Tricker's, which has heroically resisted the temptation to make trendy footwear, had found itself in fashion's vanguard. It seems that the velvet slipper has become the 21st-century answer to what the distinctively patterned Hermes tie was in the Eighties, or the Nehru collared jacket during the Nineties. Anda F2 Rowland, majority shareholder of the 8 Duke of Windsor's favourite London .
tailor Anderson & Sheppard, reckons -2 this is because 'men have relatively little opportunity to express individuality in the way they dress. And like smoking jackets with jeans, these slippers seem to have become a trend quite recently; it is all about mixing items, each element is correct in itself but the way it is mixed is individual. We have sold an increasing number of smoking jackets, which people will wear with jeans and a casual shirt and velvet slippers.'
'It used to be that the black velvet slipper was either a Duke of Devonshire type thing, the sort of shoe a grandee would wear,' says Jeremy Hackett, chairman of the eponymous outfitters. 'But I was surprised this winter to find that we had a run on them — they were particularly popular with men in their early twenties. I am so old-fashioned that I would have thought the youth of today favoured what I believe are called trainers,' says Hackett demonstrating his acute grasp of modern Britain, tut they love these classic leather-soled "Albert" slippers, and not just in black: claret, bottle-green, and navy blue were also selling well. I am told by some of my younger sales staff that they are quite the thing to wear clubbing, and I don't think they mean Boodle's or Brooks's.'
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