Velvet Slippers
Luxuriousness
A Day that Never Really Starts
About Velvet Slippers
We’ve flirted with laziness before: Hallowtide Octave, Churning Day, Museum Hooky, Self-Care Sunday, and Carnival Hooky. But Velvet Slippers is the pinnacle of the art. This is the day that refuses to start, because starting would imply you intend to accomplish something. You don’t. The rules are simple. You must be luxuriously attired (pajamas, robes, silken wraps), and you must go about your non-business as if you were royalty exiled from all responsibilities. Velvet slippers are the spiritual heart of this holiday. We use them not for walking but for gliding from room to room, sipping things, fluffing cushions, and watching films you’ve already seen ten times. If you feel like changing things up, wear a robe over your gym attire and roller skate to the nearest 7-Eleven for more ice cream. Yes, you may go to the spa, but only if you arrive in silk pajamas and fuzzy socks. And yes, you may go to brunch, but bring your childhood stuffed animal and a satin clutch. Today, the world must conform to your comfort.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Make a breakfast that feels like a massage. Eat it with one hand.
(B) Recommended
Leave the house only to be admired. Maintain eye contact while wearing slippers and a bathrobe in public.
(C) High effort
Wake when the spirit moves you. Nap strategically, with a cashmere throw and mild delusions of grandeur. Summon your spouse (I dare you).
Inspiration
Let’s set the record straight: out of 120 days in this almanac, only five are dedicated to doing nothing in particular (and Museum Hooky barely counts). That’s just 4% devoted to the art of self-indulgence. Sound perfectly reasonable if you ask me. Of course, the reality is that at least another seventy days involve eating or making special treats, which suggests that while this book may lift you out of your post-Christmas, post-Mardi Gras blues, it might also shave a few years off your life. Such is the price of high-quality seasonal cheer. But these ‘do nothing’ days are not all the same. On Churning Day, you might make ice cream. On Velvet Slippers, you do nothing while wearing silken pajamas. Your entertainment choices are also very different. Today we reach for films that showcase other people luxuriating so you can study their technique. Some holidays acknowledge you can’t get out of bed; this one is about making your bed so decadent, so inviting, that others envy it and maybe even join you. Velvet Slippers is a celebration of comfort as performance art, in which you are both star and audience.
Adornments
Watch
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Set in a pink-frosted alpine republic between the wars, Wes Anderson’s lavish caper follows Monsieur Gustave H., a fastidious concierge with a fondness for cologne, poetry, and older women. What begins as a murder mystery turns into a breakneck escape across snowy rooftops, grand dining rooms, and secret society headquarters.
La Dolce Vita (1961)
Fellini’s dreamlike portrait of postwar Rome trails Marcello, a disenchanted gossip columnist drifting through a week of high-society excess. Its most famous scene—Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain— captures the movie’s mood: sensual, surreal.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly is less a person than an aesthetic, floating through Manhattan in dark glasses, pearls, and an air of detachment. The story follows her flirtation with a neighboring writer and her resistance to being truly known.
Read
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
A collection of linked stories chronicling the misadventures of Bertie Wooster—a cheerfully idle young gentleman—and his preternaturally capable valet, Jeeves. Bertie floats from one minor catastrophe to the next, all gently but firmly corrected by Jeeves’s interventions.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Told in hindsight by a melancholy narrator, this novel recounts his entanglement with an aristocratic Catholic family and their slowly crumbling estate.
How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson
Structured around the hours of a lazy day—from a late-morning wakeup to midnight philosophizing— this irreverent manifesto defends the pleasures of loafing, napping, daydreaming, and general non-productivity.