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Did people not take their shoes off as much in the 1980s? Because when I was a child, there wasn’t a snowdrift of abandoned shoes at the front door, like there is in my house now. I’m sure we just walked around indoors, wearing shoes, and took them off to go to bed. But times have changed. It seems we’re all removing our shoes as soon as we step into our own — and each other’s — homes. Going for dinner at friends’ houses in 2025 can feel like going through airport security. And summer feels a particularly painful juncture in this trend.
I tread carefully here because this subject is a minefield of class, culture and etiquette. In many parts of the world — most of Asia, Africa, Scandinavia — it’s highly discourteous to not remove one’s shoes at the door. And fair enough — because shoes are dirty, no two ways about it. A study by the University of Arizona suggested 96 per cent of shoes had faecal matter on them. Microbiologist Dr Charles Gerba, who did the research, found that viruses thrive better on the soles of shoes than they do on loo seats.
And in May, Dr Tracey Woodruff, a professor at the University of California, wrote a piece on how her decades-long research into the dangers of microplastics has led her to enact a blanket ban of shoes indoors at home.
I live in rural Wiltshire and fight a daily, losing battle with mud, which means I spend a lot of time at home barking at my children to take their shoes off. But something in me is missing the heady shoes-on days, the fearlessness and freedom of it, now we are all shuffling around in our socks.
It’s definitely generational. I don’t remember my grandparents removing their shoes at all, unless they were Wellington boots. Are shoes indoors another casualty of a generation obsessed with germs? I ask my friend Solveig, age 80. “Oh, I can’t bear having to remove my shoes in someone’s house!” she says from her kitchen, in shoes. “It’s terribly uncivilised to make people take their shoes off, rather prissy, and often quite humiliating if you happen to have a large potato in your sock . . .”
Perhaps that’s what’s so off-putting: the public visibility of one’s socks — or, worse, one’s actual naked feet when you’re unprepared for it. It can feel quite vulnerable — intimate, even — to reveal you’re wearing little pink socks with hearts on them, or ones with a hole in the toe. Summer feet are deeply unsavory: sweaty, grimy and frankly safer cooped up in shoes. I also often find removing shoes troubling, logistically. Some take ages to put on. It feels barely worth it to unlace and lace my boots for a single cup of coffee with a neighbour. We’d be there all day. After my goodbyes, I slide in my feet and stomp back up the road with them unlaced, boy band-style.
We need to at least agree on a moratorium on having to remove shoes at friends’ houses after dark. It’s madness to request people remove their footwear in the evening; yes, your guests are going to soil your carpets but suck it up! Because, often, evening outfits hinge on the shoes. A cute 1960s minidress with a knee-high boot becomes school uniform without the footwear. A tailored suit that’s elegant with a brogue looks daft when you’re padding about in socks. These days one needs to plan one’s going-out outfit for possible shoe-removal scenarios, and that is a tall order. I have yet to see it done successfully, because clothes look rubbish without shoes — they’re needed for edge, humour, colour or contrast. Shoes might well be revolting harbingers of sick bugs, but they matter.
Socks are often smelly, deeply un-chic and not robust enough for draughty cottages like mine with stone floors. I hate it when the children walk around in socks (blackening the soles and wearing holes in them), which has given rise to a socks-and-sliders compromise my husband and tweenage boys can get on board with.
Slippers, well, they’re problematic too, giving the vague sense of being an invalid. One friend went to a house where they gave her a set of disposable hotel slippers to wear after she’d removed her shoes, like she was an inpatient. There’s nothing like kicking off the daisy roots after a long day, but a house slipper should feel substantial, something with heft and structure — like a shoe. And if people are coming over, the slippers should come off. Wearing slippers when people come over makes it look like I’m longing for them to hurry up and leave so I can get back to reading my book.
Because that is what this is all about, isn’t it? Good manners. Who gets to be the most polite person here? Is it politest to be the guest who takes your shoes off at someone’s house? Or is it more polite to be the host who lets their guests keep their shoes on, and stomach the dangers? The shoe’s on your foot to decide.
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