By Jon Mooallem
When he was in his mid-30s, Percy Steinhart walked away from a successful career in banking at Citigroup to, as his younger brother, Frank, put it, "pursue his dream of creating the perfect velvet Edwardian slipper" -- demonstrating, with spectacular flair, that there are, in fact, second acts in American lives.
Steinhart, who immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba as a boy and died in New York on Oct. 19 at the age of 76 after a long illness, was the founder and creative visionary behind Stubbs & Wootton, a maker of stylish and often whimsical men's and women's smoking slippers, which he founded in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1993. The footwear, worn both indoors and outdoors, sells for between $750 and $1,500 a pair.
Steinhart's playful embroidery and needlepoint designs informalized a traditionally prim product and gained him a devoted following among fashionistas and celebrities. While the tops of some Stubbs & Wootton slippers bear custom monograms and crests, fishing flies or pheasants -- familiar iconography of aristocratic leisure -- other designs, for example, feature a diner to-go cup of coffee on the right shoe and an everything bagel on the left; or the letters O.B. and U.F. ("overbred and underfunded") or, less cryptically, spelling out messages like I DO or declaring DU MB.
Steinhart's most famous design features an image of a screw on one shoe and the letter U, in a collegiate font, on the other.
Fans of the brand have included Lady Gaga, former NBA star Carmelo Anthony and King Juan Carlos I of Spain. This summer, Anne Hathaway was photographed in a pair on the set of "The Devil Wears Prada 2." In 1997, Steinhart, whose philanthropic activities included work with the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museum, received a private audience with Pope John Paul II and gifted him a custom pair of Stubbs & Woottons with the papal insignia. He subsequently gave slippers to Pope Benedict XVI, too.
Steinhart's shoes caught fire with a younger demographic in 2010, after the brand was discovered by Kanye West. West, who now goes by Ye, was shopping at Barney's in New York with the late designer Virgil Abloh when he noticed a pair, embroidered with jousting knights, on the feet of another customer, a Yale student named Cassius Marcellus Cornelius Clay.
Before long, West hired Clay as a creative consultant. "By the time I started working with them a few months later, there were already several pairs in Kanye's wardrobe," Clay recalled. "The slipper became an important part of the baroque visual language for [West's] projects like 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' and 'Watch the Throne.' " In 2011, Stubbs & Wootton told The Wall Street Journal sales had risen about 40% in the preceding year, driven partly by interest from young men.
"Culturally, they captured the sockless, preppy and metrosexual trends of the 2000s and early 2010s, when men's fashion-consciousness expanded at pace," Clay went on. "S&W offered sprezzatura-lite and an accessible esprit of a la carte witticisms...A faint but perceptible echo of irony followed each slippered step."
An Anglophile, Steinhart named his company after two favorite 18th-century English sporting painters, George Stubbs and John Wootton. He'd initially wanted to call it "Holden & Caulfield," but explained: "My lawyer told me Salinger would rake me over the coals."
In fact, his design sensibility hovered somewhere between those two poles: Old World gentlemanliness and youthful subversion; stiff upper lip and tongue-in-cheek. In an interview with Women's Wear Daily, Steinhart claimed he could find inspiration in anything from "a sewer cover on a New York street to columns of the Parthenon."
Prestigious lineage
Percival P. Steinhart III was born March 24, 1949, in Havana, Cuba, one of five siblings in a family with a prestigious lineage. His mother's family founded Havana's Banco Gelats, while his paternal great-grandfather, Frank Maximilian Steinhart, one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and a onetime American consul general to Cuba, built Havana's electric streetcar system.
The Steinharts left Cuba for Miami in 1960. In 1970, Percy graduated with a degree in business administration from Georgetown University and began ascending through the International Private Banking Division at Citigroup (then Citibank). But in 1983, he was recruited to design shoes for Miami-based footwear brand Unisa by its founder, Carlos Musso -- a friend from Georgetown who'd always been impressed by Steinhart's taste in clothing, furniture and antiques. "The shoe industry was totally alien to him," Musso explained -- but Steinhart took the leap.
His brother, Frank, who now leads Stubbs & Wootton, said, "That opportunity opened a different side of him. It just opened a new world." And after almost a decade with Unisa, Steinhart ventured out on his own, focusing exclusively on the footwear he'd first admired on preppy boys' feet at Georgetown and then re-encountered around South Florida.
"We all had the same slipper with fox heads, the Prince of Wales plumes, a crown or our monograms," Steinhart later recalled. He wanted to make a version that wasn't so stiff -- literally and figuratively: more flexible and comfortable to wear, but also designed with more whimsy and verve, transforming that marker of aristocratic conformity into something edgier and more individualistic.
Steinhart opened his first shop on Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, Fla.'s luxury-shopping boulevard, in 1993 and never left the avenue; the company's flagship showroom -- one of its two stores, along with a location on Madison Avenue in Manhattan -- is a short distance down the street from the original shop and has become a destination for vacationing cognoscenti.
Steinhart was proud of Stubbs & Wootton's status as a Palm Beach brand. He had deep roots in the community -- his family spent time there when he was young -- and, as the aura around his footwear grew, so did his stature in an elite tier of Palm Beach society, which included other designers and artists as well as billionaires like David Koch and former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Ross wore a custom pair of slippers, embroidered with the Commerce Department's insignia, to President Trump's first speech to a joint session of Congress in 2017.
Overflowing with charisma
Friends describe Steinhart blazing around parties with his infectious smile and high-wattage charisma -- from intimate dinners to Palm Beach's exclusive "Coconuts" New Year's Eve party. (Steinhart, who was gay, didn't marry or have a long-term partner, according to family and friends.) "He had a natural way of knowing which ladies needed to be kissed and cuddled and caressed, and which big businessmen needed a firm handshake," explained Nelson Hammell, proprietor of Devonshire of Palm Beach, an English garden antique shop in West Palm Beach.
Lucy Nielsen Musso, a friend for many years, described Steinhart's arriving at her door one Halloween unannounced, dressed as Flo, the Progressive Insurance spokeswoman, and performatively trying to sell her new policies.
"When you have, let's say, the elegance, and the eye, and that level of success, you're usually a pain in the you-know-what; you can be a little bit of a snot," Nielsen Musso said. "But Percy had the rare combination of wonderful class, wonderful elegance, but, at the same time, he was fun and down to earth. My housekeepers adored him. The housekeepers are sad!"
One of Steinhart's great passions was furnishing and decorating his homes. In 2021, he purchased a house in Litchfield, Conn., built in 1784 and originally owned by a Revolutionary War spymaster, which he steadily transformed into an impeccably decorated sanctuary for himself.
Having battled alcoholism, Steinhart had worked resolutely to achieve sobriety roughly 20 years earlier. (Nielson Musso said, "He became more forgiving, very calm. Not that he was ever nasty, but sobriety made him tender, calmer, even more generous than before.") And though he still had homes in Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, and continued to enjoy his lifestyle there, Steinhart seemed to appreciate the slowness and solitude Litchfield afforded him, explained Justin Irvine, Stubbs & Wootton's creative director and a friend. He seemed content to sit in his garden or by the pool, and spent time trolling eBay for works of art or curios to continue perfecting his home.
"He always wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, or making beautiful things, or acquiring beautiful things," Irvine said.
Write to Jon Mooallem at jon.mooallem@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 13, 2025 14:00 ET (19:00 GMT)
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