What to think of a time when we go out in pajamas, just enhanced with an evening jacket and white sneakers to complete the “sleepwear” look? From a time when joggers are replacing pants, where hoodies are the new shirts? Of a time, finally, when slippers were snapped up, so much so that some manufacturers of these traditional slippers found themselves just in time? “On our Chausse Mouton brand, we doubled our sales between 2019 and 2020, thanks to the confinements, explains Isabelle Fulgeanu, general manager of the manufacturer Fargeot & Cie. What is surprising is that the craze continues: in winter 2021, sales increased by another 50% compared to 2020.” Born in 2012 in a garage in Hem (Nord), La Pantoufle à Pépère, which wanted to dust off the Charentaise, has enjoyed the same success in recent years, in particular on its French Pépère and Pépère Flower models.
At first glance, one could say that this textile softening is the visible manifestation of a generalized collapse of our consciences. We have become soft, perhaps from being confronted with so much harshness. Putin invades Ukraine? All in slippers! While we could resume an almost normal life, after two years of atrophied freedom, we very often prefer to wallow in a soft sofa, with a soft plaid, soft clothes and soft slippers. But behind the apparent comfort of the absence of constraint, lumbago lurks. Because cheetah-print footwear can’t forever mask an agonizing question: is that what we aspire to? Now that we have contributed to the advent of the cocoon civilization, what should we do?
Low noise resistor
Perhaps we are arriving at the exhaustion of a logic. At breaking point (soft). In this hypothesis, softness would then be the unexpected tool of a revolt. The system would collapse not in the deafening din of the sounds of boots but in the padded silence of slippers. Low noise resistance, and even no noise at all, thanks to the felt sole and the lined interior. The revolution in slippers!
In his short and very funny novel The slippers (The Avenging Tree, 2020), which has just been reissued in Folio, Luc-Michel Fouassier makes this soft revolution the framework of his story. The narrator notices that he has forgotten to put on his moccasins when he has just slammed the door of his house. He finds himself in slippers outside. At the post office, in the subway and then in a work meeting, wearing these incongruous accessories arouses embarrassment in him, but also a certain satisfaction. “It was not unpleasant to walk in the street with slippers on your feet, it gave you the sweet impression of treading on a soft and silent carpet of moss, the hard sidewalk taking on the trappings of a path of undergrowth. »
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