Furry shoes are the ASMR videos of the footwear world

I don’t know about you, but Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response content constitutes at least 50 per cent of my Instagram feed at any one time. As a consequence I find myself spending long hours watching unidentified metal presses transforming whole sweets into great discs of rainbow mush and have been known to waste days perving on Dr Pimple Popper as she squeezes blackheads, cysts and acne spots on her page, which boasts more than 165,000 followers. 

One of the more surprising recent developments in men’s fashion (alongside Hedi Slimane’s new grunger jeans for Celine), is the flurry of furry shoes, which are, in my opinion, the ASMR videos of the footwear world. I can’t stop looking at (and, in turn, buying) pairs of them online, and there’s something about their extravagant tactility which gives me the same kind of braingasm I get from watching a digital knife cut repeatedly through brightly coloured digital clay over and over and over (and over) again.

I should probably clarify that by furry shoes I absolutely do not mean slippers. The best slippers come lined in padded-cum-quilted silk or satin, if slipper aficionado Stubbs & Wootton is to be believed (they are), and any slippers which do feature faux fur, shearling or fluffy elements should really have them concealed within the shoe, for cosiness, rather than exposed on the uppers for all the world to see. 

It should also be stated that this new breed of furry shoe is not really about comfort – indeed, many of the best are constructed with the same cobbling rigour as classic loafers and lace-ups – but rather, I think, about a primal return to the kind of clothes we’d have worn some 500,000 years ago, when the early Homo Sapiens wrapped their feet in animal fur to keep warm. The past 15 months have, after all, felt about as traumatic as being chased across the primordial tundra by a pack of sabre-toothed tigers, so it stands to reason that we’re craving clothes that fulfil both our intrinsic urge to protect ourselves as much as they do our innate desire to be soothed.

From Maison Margiela’s faux-shearling coated take on its classic Tabi babouche to Prada’s recently unleashed line of black shearling-coated loafers (finished, naturally, with the brand’s triangular metal insignias) and Gucci’s re-release of the lamb-fur sandals which first stalked the runway for Alessandro Michele’s inaugural show in 2015 (the sandals have been reimagined in faux fur for 2021, in line with Gucci’s rigorous sustainability policies), the array of fluffy shoes on offer is as broad as it is, well, tranquillising. 

Beyond their baseline ASMR appeal, however, these new furry shoes also play into a wider menswear movement toward tactility. At Bottega Veneta, arguably the “it”-est of the “it” brands right now, creative director Daniel Lee was one of the first to tap into our collective need for squidgy-ness. In each of the seasonal collections he’s released since joining the brand in 2018, Lee has reimagined classic pieces, accessories in particular, in increasingly tactile iterations. Last season, espadrilles, which would usually be made in canvas, were crafted from densely textured bouclé wool, while this season the brand’s basic pool slides have been given an ASMR-style makeover, layered with ultra-squidgy lashings of grass-green terry towelling.  

It’s not just the brands who are getting on board with the shift towards squish, either. Both A$AP Rocky and stylist Marc Goehring have been spotted in the aforementioned Bottega slides, while the likes of Justin Bieber, Iggy Pop and Steven Tyler have all made sterling cases for wearing Crocs in public. And let’s not forget Gucci’s shearling-lined Princeton loafers, which have maintained their position at the top of the silly-accessories pyramid since they were first introduced by Alessandro Michele in 2015.

No matter their relevance in the post-Covid style canon, however, there’s no point pretending that these new furry shoes are particularly easy to wear. As objects – works of fashion art – they are worth their weight in ASMR pixels, but on foot? The whole thing gets a bit stickier. The best thing to do, therefore, is to wear them with carefree abandon and forget all the rules you think you know, because if the furry-footed early Homo Sapiens could get away with wearing whatever the hell they wanted, then why too shouldn’t you? 

Here’s our pick of the best furry shoes shuffling around right now…

1. The angular ones

2. The summer-ready ones

3. The ones that’ll make you look like a yeti

4. The chi-chi ones

5. The show-offs

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