If the shoe doesn’t fit ... surf with it. Among the many applications for the rubber slipper (swatting cockroaches, stabilizing tables, knocking down mangoes), you can win bodysurfing competitions. Kai Santos (pictured) took first prize in last year’s Da Hui Waimea Bay Shorebreak Slam using his daughter’s slipper as a handboard.

As part of the everyday material world, slippers have taken on functions beyond the feet. No greater or more convenient cock-a-roach whapper exists, and when neighborhood kids put together cul-de-sac kickball games, they’ve always got more than enough bases. Long before the proliferation of boogie boards on Hawai‘i’s beaches, rubber slippers were tearing up the shorebreak; bodysurfers would hold a slipper in their extended hand to help them plane along the face of a wave. That old fad was revived in 2010 during Da Hui Waimea Bay Shorebreak Slam, a bodysurfing contest that included a Kanaka Style Rubbah Slippah Handboard Division. “We thought, ‘They’ve got all these high-tech handboards now, let’s see what we can do with the rubbah slippah,’” says the event coordinator, Mahina Chillingsworth. “Some work better than others. One guy wore, like, size 14s, which went from his wrist to his elbow. The guy who won used a small size that fit right into his hand. I think he took them off his daughter’s feet right before his heat.”

Over the last sixty years or so, the slipper has been a force that has literally changed the shape of Hawai‘i, at least below the ankle. Footwear is fate. A foot raised in an enclosed shoe grows scrunched, like the root ball of a plant raised a pot. A foot raised in a slipper grows wider, stronger and more dexterous. A local girl raised in slippers might never find a pair of high heels to fit her big lü‘au feet, but she can probably pick up her car keys with her toes. Sure, the American Podiatric Medical Association issues dire warnings of the trauma and pathologic abnormalities associated with flip-flops (their word!), but for so many of the slipper-loving people of Hawai‘i, the specter of twisted ankles, stubbed toes, fallen arches and plantar fasciitis are no match for the freedom of the foot the slipper offers. The slipper promises happy feet, and, let’s face it, if your feet aren’t happy, you’re not happy.

Of course, happiness has a flip side. As far as footwear goes, the slipper is unusually good at evoking contempt. Brian Moylan, etiquette maven for the Manhattan-based website Gawker, puts it bluntly. “I hate flip-flops,” he writes. “I think they are disgusting, uncouth and unattractive.” Amanda Fortini, a writer for the online magazine Slate, in an article headlined “Why We Scorn the Lowly Thong,” says flip-flops seem lazy both on the part of the wearer, “who can’t be bothered with buckles or laces,” and on the part of the shoe: “We’d like our shoes to be the product of more ambition.” The rapper DMX once declared: “Thugs don’t do flip-flops. Yo, no matter how much vacation I’m on … I don’t wear no flip-flops. I’m never that comfortable, ever, not even in my own house!” Hip-hop ain’t down with the flip-flop.

There will probably always be slipper haters, but the march of the slipper toward equality with other footwear has advanced in the last few decades as dress codes have grown more casual and the slipper has found greater acceptance as everyday footwear. What has long been the norm in Hawai‘i—where nobody thinks twice about a slipper in a restaurant, at a wedding, in the workplace—is spreading through the greater society. But even in Hawai‘i there are limits. Take doctors. According to a Hawai‘i Medical Journal survey of patient attitudes toward physician attire, a small majority (57 percent) prefers that their doctor not be in slippers when seeing them. The patients also preferred their doctor not wear a white lab coat, either, so they want a little formality, just not too much.