{Photo via photographersgallery.com}

{Photo via Details.com}

This fall it appears that the ballet flat, which has dominated the fashionable yet comfortable and pragmatic shoe category for years, will be traded in for the smoking slipper-like shoe in luxurious fabrics and colors.  Apparently our Mad Men-crazed masses are still nostalgic for that sixties style so we look to the quintessential Playboy of that era, Hugh Hefner, for fashion inspiration.  Ask Google about Hugh Hefner and thousands of halloween costumes will appear, various men in cheesy poses holding a pipe and wearing that signature smoking jacket in terrible polyester and paisley.  But you have to admit Hugh knew how to look good while being comfy.  Hugh said that 1960 “was the year I came out from behind my desk and started living the life exposed in the magazine – smoking the pipe, wearing the smoking jacket, driving a Mercedes Benz 300SL.”  Nowadays, he’s famous (or infamous?) for having multiple peroxide girlfriends in the reality series “The Girls Next Door” and he’s still shuffling around in his bespoke silk pajamas and smoking jacket and slippers made by the star shoemaker himself. Well into his geriatric years, Hefner is still the poster boy for Hollywood living and his slippers are everywhere this fall.  In a 1908 editorial in The Washington Post, way before Hefner’s rise,  a stylish and sensible Mr. Mifflington said,”Smoking jacket and slippers are synonymous with comfort but if I could have only one of these I should take the slippers.”  Ditto.

You may need a magnifying glass for those numbers but I promise you they do exist.

1. Gianni Versace meets Hugh Hefner in Miu Miu slippers, 2. Channeling Kate Middleton in Valentino, 3. flats flashy enough for Kim Kardashian thanks to Giuseppe Zanotti,  4. Traffic cone safety from Nicholas Kirkwood, 5. the only ones that I would actually wear more than once made by Jenni Kayne, 6. Charlotte’s Web