STYLE: IF THE SHOE FITS

VANITIES

During a six-week stay at the Sunset Tower, JULI WEINER slipped into something more comfortable for daily life—a plush pair of hotel slippers. Here, she makes the case for taking them to the street

JULI WEINER

In January I headed west from New York to Los Angeles to work in the writers room of a television show. I'd be in LA for five months. My plan upon arrival was to spend a week at the Sunset Tower Hotel while I searched for a short-term rental. Due to a combination of external and internal factors—the nuttiness of the post-fires housing market and my own long-standing persnicketiness—it ended up being six weeks before I found a price-gouged bungalow in the Hills I was willing to overpay for.

I dreaded the end of my time in the Tower. I knew I'd have to give it up eventually: the $ 10 small pot of (delicious, worth every penny) room service coffee, the turndown service, the dazzling rapport I'd developed with the valet. ("Hey, how's it going?" "Good, you?" "Good.") But perhaps there was a way I could take the hotel with me....

It was during this time as an artist in residence in the hotel that I started wearing the Tower's signature plush ecru hotel slippers as outdoor shoes. What they lacked in durability they made up for in style. They had soul, if not sole. Soon enough I started wearing them nearly exclusively, which was easy given LA's notorious criminalization of walking and famously nonthreatening climate. It never rains in Southern California— unless you've left your convertible parked overnight with the top down.

I wore slippers to the writers room, restaurants, parties, friends' houses, and Rick Caruso's many unavoidable shoppingwards. They "functioned" as driving shoes, sneakers, and formalwear. "Functioned" in quotes because functionality is a spectrum. I found slippers thrillingly incompatible with daily life. Sure, I couldn't run in them, but what shoes could I run in? None, really.

Slippers quickly became my "thing." When other people would take trips and fly business class, they'd bring slippers back for me. It's nice having a thing because it facilitates bonding. Slippers are a shortcut to friendship, familiarity, and coziness.

They're decadent but inexpensive, exclusive but readily available. At present there's a pair of Sunset Tower slippers going for $50 on eBay. The brand Brunch sells a pair of Beverly Hills Hotel slippers, produced "in collaboration with the pink palace," for $ 108. At the risk of editorializing, don't buy either of these. Slippers are free with a $600 hotel room.

As a New Yorker in LA, I believed the slippers were a testament to my transience—a broadcast of my glamorous impermanence. Even after I left LA, I started wearing them in New York. I liked traipsing around Manhattan—what a rare joy, to truly traipse—with nothing but a centimeter of plastic and a half inch of padding separating my bare skin from the city streets. It felt treacherous yet rarefied and somehow old-world. I thought of the invariably tuxedoed members of Oxford's Dangerous Sports Club plotting to careen down the Cresta Run in a shopping cart. In slippers, the Bowery was my Cresta Run. I tut-tutted in the face of tetanus.

Not only do hotel-branded slippers say where you've been, they announce where you're going: nowhere—and in no hurry to get there. They indicate frictionless days and endless nights, a ring-a-ding life spent on fine rugs and plush carpeting.

No one was particularly surprised when, four months into my soft-shoe years, I tripped down the stairs and sprained my ankle. (That time, you see, I was the slipper.) My foot doubled in size and turned the color of blueberry yogurt, then green, then yellow. For weeks the swelling precluded me from wearing footwear that constricted the ankle. I didn't care. I had already fallen for, and indeed because of, my slippers.

FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.