I grew up in the USSR, where tapochki—indoor slippers—were worn habitually. We changed into them when we came home, leaving the dirt of the outdoors at the entrance. We carried them to school where our fellow students stood guard at the door posted by the principal with the sole purpose of checking our bags for smenka, the change of footwear. Museums provided containers of felt mules by the entrance for visitors to don over boots before entering the halls. And we knew that when we visited a friend, we would be expected to take off our shoes and wear the slippers the host owned just for that occasion. Walking inside a home—any home—while still wearing outdoor shoes was bad form. [...]
Personal objects separating the outside and the inside can be found in European paintings as early as the 15th century. In The Arnofini Portrait (1434), Jan Van Eyck included two pairs of pattens—the wooden clogs usually worn over the indoor shoes to protect footwear from the mud and dirt of the outside. The 1514 engraving Saint Gerome in His Study, by Albrecht Durer, also features shoes that seem to indicate domestic use—a pair of mules in the foreground, stored under a bench with books and pillows. Whether they are there to suggest their purpose as outdoor-only footwear or the beginning of the practice of using mules at home we may never know. Yet just as in the Van Eyck’s work, a discarded pair of shoes—the shoes that the subject isn’t wearing at home—may be the indication of a new custom taking hold: a custom of separating footwear into indoor and outdoor.
Around this time, the conquests of the Ottoman Empire brought Eastern habits into the European continent. “[Most Ottoman people] were wearing outdoor shoes over the indoor shoes like galoshes,” explains Lale Gorunur, the curator of the Sadberk Hanim Museum in Istanbul. “But they’d never go indoors with outdoor shoes. They’d always take off the outdoor shoes at the gate of the house.” Territories under the empire’s rule seemed to adopt this habit, and slippers remain common in countries like Serbia and Hungary. [...]
Portraits of the Russian upper classes of the 18th and 19th century frequently feature subjects in either the Ottoman style mules or in thin—intended for indoor use—slipper-shoes. The same couldn’t be said for the poor. Peasants and laborers are either shown barefoot, wearing boots meant for outdoor work, or donning valenki, the traditional Russian felt boot. Perhaps because of this link between the indoor footwear and the leisure of the rich, tapochki were snubbed immediately following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Remnants of the maligned, old world had no place in the new Soviet paradigm. But the sentiment didn’t stick. Although never as extravagant or ornate as before, soon tapochki were back in most Soviet homes offering their owners comfort after a long day of building the Communist paradise.
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