Stubbs & Wootton is a luxury brand founded in 1993 that produces slippers and other footwear, opting for elegance, superior quality and versatility. Rather than Stubbs and Wootton being the company’s founders, the name of the brand is derived from two 18th century English artists, George Stubbs and John Wootton,
who specialized in painting scenes of “gentlemanly sporting”. Their showrooms are open in New York, Palm Beach, Florida and Greenwich, Connecticut.
Even kings get bored
A loafer is a lazy person, perhaps too lazy to tie or untie his own shoelaces. Hence, the name “loafer” stuck to a laceless variety of the flexible country shoe that could be worn and removed without too much trouble. The first loafer is known as the “Wildsmith Loafer” and was designed by Raymond Lewis Wildsmith. Wildsmith Shoes, a bespoke shoe company established in 1847, received a very special order from a very special client: King George IV. The first loafer’s success indicates that the king, his noblemen and the royal family had indeed enough of laces.
The Aurland shoe: part Norwegian, part Native American.
In 1894, a young Norwegian who had travelled to the New World to learn the craft of shoemaking returned home. His name was Nils Gregoriusson Tveranger and in 1930 he launched a laceless shoe called “Aurland moccasin”. It was inspired by the Iroquois moccasins Tveranger had seen during his stay in America but also resembled the plain shoes worn by fishermen in his native Aurland.
Produced en masse and exported to the rest of the Old World, the new leather shoe was to make its way back to the States by American tourists who would pick it up across Europe. When it reached America, the “Norwegian” gained immense popularity as an outdoor shoe adequate to good weather. In spite of Tveranger’s efforts to patent his successful creation, it was meant to be reproduced, namely by G.H. Bass, a bootmaker in Wilton Maine, who would christen his new shoes “Weejuns”-short for “Norwegians”. By 1936, Bass’s company would make another contribution to the loafer’s evolution: they included a fashionable leather strap running horizontally across the vamp of the shoe. What’s more, they placed a horizontal lip-like cut across the strap, ideal for placing objects inside. Especially pennies.
Debunking the myth of the penny loafer
What can be said with certainty is that the humble fisherman’s loafer was quickly adopted by the young sophisticated prep-school students of the 1950’s and that it became part of the “Ivy Leaguers” culture. Wishing to make a flashy fashion statement, Ivy Leaguers would slip a penny in their Weejuns’s slit which, as the story has it, would come in handy when in need of an emergency call home. However, this is just an urban legend. Phone calls in the USA have never, not even in the 30s, cost below five cents, nor have the pay phones ever accepted pennies.
From campuses to Wall Street and more
The once casual loafer was to continue its American rocket ride to prestige as it was paired with formal suits in the 1960s. In 1966, Italian designer Aldo GucciAldo Gucci (1905-1990) was the eldest of five children born of Guccio Gucci and his wife Aida Calvelli. Working in his father’s shop from age 20 he contributed immensely to the firm’s growth and international expansion, opening the first Gucci store in American soil only two weeks before his father’s passing (1952). After the death of their brother Vasco in 1974, Rodolfo and Aldo Gucci divided their business in equal shares. This decision was not accepted by Aldo’s sons, however, who felt that Rodolfo had not done enough for the company, their discontent resulting in bitter family feuds.
In 1980 the Gucci civil war peaked with Aldo’s son Paolo managing to have his father removed from the company while at the same time tipping off the IRS about his tax evasion. In 1986, eighty-one-year-old Aldo was tried for evading $7million in New York and sentenced to one year imprisonment which he served at the Federal Prison Camp Eglin. He died of prostate cancer four years later.
In 2021 Ridley Scott directed the biographical film drama “House of Gucci” which gives an account of the power struggle inside the Gucci family. The film, starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver and Jeremy Irons is based on the 2001 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed by Sara Gay Forden.
made his contribution to the ever-evolving loafer by adding a metal strap across the front, in the manner of a horse’s snaffle bit.
The “Gucci loafer” which is now a general term referring to shoes manufactured not just by Gucci, was to become part of the uniform of 1970’s courtrooms, reaching its peak by the eighties when it was adopted by Wall Street yuppies. After the 1987 stock market crash, however, the loafer returned to its familiar campuses with the penny loafer seeing a resurgence during the 90’s and at the start of the 21st century. Today, a pair of easy to wear, flexible loafers matched with jeans or chino pants is advisable in casual contexts and can be pulled off with a suit only “in the perfect conditions”.
As for this particular pair of Stubbs & Wotton straw loafers, well, the perfect conditions would be a lazy day in the sun.