The dude at my work two desks over, the guy who still writes appointments in a physical calendar, was telling me that his father had one pair of sheepskin slippers for eleven years. Singular. One. Men’s, women’s, “slippers,” but when they wore them out they were all wearing off-brand slipper iterations of the exact same last in different shoe sizes. My immediate thought was he was living in the past because I googled it under my desk while on a legitimately useless work phone call and he’s basically correct about this generation right now except not for the reason he thinks. The men’s UGG Tasman and the women’s UGG Tasman are not two slippers wearing different equivalent outfits.
They are the exact same last, the exact same shearling, down to the same stitch every-THING run through different size charts and different model photography assignments. Which means the real, important question nobody ever asks that totally dictates whether the thing on your foot works or just sorta KINDA closes around your foot has almost zero to do with gender itself.
The size chart does all the work, not the cut
Quick note on something I went dig and double-check just to make sure Urban was funny and not just kinda wrong: there is no functional difference between the men’s version of the Tasman and the women’s version outside of the size chart and the model/product photography. Same shape, same width across the foot at the widest point, same construction techniques underneath the shearling. The variable that changes is the number branded on the outside of the box because that number belongs to a conversion chart, not a design decision. Meaning a man with a legitimately narrow or small foot would probably find his mileage better in the women’s sized chart than trying to jam into a men’s sized 7 that wasn’t particularly small/too narrow to begin with just because “that’s how you guys do things. “
I know a guy at work. The one who does all the T&E reports and refuses to speak above a whisper in meetings. His natural foot size for dress shoes is a men’s 8 but his ground size for the Tasman is a womens size 9 simply because that’s where his foot falls most naturally on the chart between the two and still feels the most snug. He will tell you himself it fits better than his dress shoes do and he’s got about as much pride as I do about wearing the “wrong” size shoe just because inches.
This is the big reason why I feel like the “are they actually the same shoe or not” conversation is sort of the wrong conversation to be having. Ask it from a construction standpoint and the truth answer is yes these are literally the exact same shoe. Ask it from a fit perspective though and the correct answer has to be no because the size you think you should buy according to男 or女 ends up being completely different than what you’d buy if you swapped sides, and if you buy blindly based on what you “always wear” rather than verifying against the actual printed chart you’ll wear half a size too small or half a size too big and blame the stupid slipper for being poorly designed when the size chart is the one doing everything wrong. Case in point: I did this exact same thing recently with a mens 9 because it felt like my foot was mailing around in there. Too big. Went back to the store, properly researched the actual size chart instead of just blindly trusting what I thought was true and adjusted down closer to a womans 8.5 shoe size and it made a night and day difference. THAT is the gap. The gap between what size you automatically gravitate towards based on street shoe and what size you should be wearing according to the freaking size chart is where almost every poor fit issue with these slippers stems from and it’s got nothing to do with being mens or womens at all.
What actually changes once the shearling starts settling in
The second thing to note that nobody talks about when they’re in the store flipping a slipper on for ninety seconds but decides to wear it for eleven months is what happens to the shearling itself after you buy it. Shearling is not a set material. It compresses with wear. The loft that made the sheep slipper feel so nice and cushioned when you first slipped it on week one does not stay lofted forever. It flattens out with actual wear, and when that happens the internal volume of the shoe gets bigger because you’re not stretching out the actual leather that much so much as the stuff inside the shoe no longer occupies the space it did when you first purchased it. A women’s size 8 slipper that felt like Wednesday hugged your foot correctly in September can easily feel more like a women’s size 8.5 by January, and that’s not a defect. That is what shearling does when it compresses under body weight day after day for however long you own the stupid thing.
This is also why purchasing your size based on feel when you’re standing in the store is kind of an incomplete test, and the reason I personally prefer sizing to the LENGTH of my foot according to whatever chart matches the slipper I’m trying on instead of how tightly my foot fits in a brand new shearling slipper. Because new isn’t permanent.
The shearling is only going to get flatter with time, not puffier, and if you size up or down based purely on that initial impression you’re ignoring where the actual wear is going to happen over time. I once purposely sized down by half a size because my foot felt too roomy the first time I wore my shearling slippers and convinced myself that was just the nature of the fit vs. the nature of the fiber compressing. By month three I was hobbling around with a slipper that had gone from just right to full-on loose in the heel with every step I took, which is an issue of its own when your default slipper is being used to carry you across buildings full of coffee.
The best measure of whether or not a slipper will fit is whether or not the actual LENGTH of your foot matches up with what the chart tells you you should wear. Not what you THINK you should wear based on nominal street shoe size. That starts you off with the correct number before the shearling even starts flattening and acts as a much better base to work from. Know what doesn’t matter? The gender you wear. They both run the exact same, just track that against the damn size chart so you know your starting point is correct.
Ade works in finance in the City and treats his wardrobe like a portfolio, which he admits is a slightly mad way to think about a blazer. He writes about office clothes that survive twelve hour days, back to back meetings and the odd video call.
