Designer Story · Made in Tunis
Five Centuries
of the Babouche
A Persian slipper, a Tunisian workshop, and one woman’s refusal to let it get boring.
Walk the medina in Tunis and you will find them stacked high in every leather stall — soft slippers in burgundy, dark brown, natural tan. The babouche has been worn in North Africa for four hundred years. It has also, in the last few decades, been quietly falling apart.
This is the story of the shoe, and of the Tunisian woman who decided to fix it.
A short history
From Persia to the medina
The open-backed slipper we call the babouche began in Persia, where it was known as the papush. It travelled west along Ottoman trade routes and reached North Africa in the sixteenth century.
Once it arrived, local makers took it apart and rebuilt it for their own leather, their own climate, their own way of dressing. Regional styles separated over time. Tunisia developed the balgha, recognizable by its rounded toe; Morocco’s version stayed more pointed.
Within Tunisia the shoe split again, this time by where you wore it. Thin, supple soles were for indoors — homes, mosques, religious schools. Heavier soles went out into the street. The colors stayed close to the hide itself: yellow, brown, natural tan.
Women’s Leather Babouche Slippers in Black — the rounded Tunisian toe.
Four centuries of refinement, and then, within a generation, industrial production. Synthetic materials spread. Glue replaced stitching. A shoe built to last started giving out in a season.
The founder
Chahrazed Chaieb
Bright orange and patterned La Babouche slippers show the brand’s contemporary approach to the traditional babouche. Image credit: supplied, via T Magazine Middle East.
Chahrazed Chaieb spent years working as a flight attendant. Beirut, Damascus, Marrakech, Casablanca — everywhere she landed, she found the same slipper, and everywhere it disappointed her. The quality had slipped. The colors had narrowed to the same handful of safe browns.
In 2013 she founded La Babouche to do it properly. Her first decision was a conservative one: keep the traditional last. The shape and fit of the shoe are unchanged, because that part had already been solved, centuries ago, by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
Everything above the last is where she went to work. Leather, velvet, suede and silk, in fuchsia, saffron, turquoise, metallic gold. Crocodile embossing and animal prints. A seamstress hand-embroiders beadwork onto some pairs — palm trees and cactus among the motifs, in honor of the foliage of Tunisia. Every pair is still cut and assembled by hand by Tunisian artisans.
“It is a traditional style that we need to preserve.”
Chahrazed Chaieb
As seen in
T Magazine Middle East
Chahrazed Chaieb spoke with journalist Amelia Dhuga about the history of the babouche, the craft behind each pair, and what it takes to keep a heritage object relevant. It is worth reading in full.
Handmade in Tunis
Four hundred years in, the babouche is still doing exactly what it was built to do. It just finally has the colors to match.
