Here is a piece of trivia that might surprise you: drinking alcohol out of a shoe is not some wild modern invention. It has been going on for well over a hundred years, across several countries, and for some surprisingly touching reasons.
The story starts, of all places, with the ballet.
Champagne and Ballet Slippers
Back in late 1800s Russia, fans of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow had a very special way of honoring their favorite dancers. The ballet company would give devoted fans the slippers worn by the performers. Those fans would then fill the slippers with champagne or vodka and drink from them: a gesture of deep admiration for the dancers’ skill and talent.
Around the same time, France was living through its Belle Époque, the Beautiful Era. Cabaret dancers there were filling their own shoes with champagne for their fans, too. The custom gradually spread across Europe and eventually made its way to the United States.
By the time celebrities like Tallulah Bankhead were seen drinking from shoes, the whole thing had taken on a glamorous, decadent image. It was a symbol of wealth and high living.
Even Hollywood got in on it. In the 2004 film The Phantom of the Opera, a character pours champagne into a diva’s slipper and drinks from it, perfectly capturing the spirit of over-the-top admiration that started the whole tradition.
Soldiers and the Boot Glass
A completely different version of the tradition grew up in military culture. One old story tells of a Prussian general who promised his troops that if they won their battle, he would drink beer from his boot. When they did win, he reportedly had a boot made out of glass — presumably because a real military boot, muddy and worn from battle, was not exactly appetizing.
There is no hard evidence for that story, but it is considered the likely origin of Germany’s bierstiefel — the boot-shaped beer glass you still see at Oktoberfest today. Other folk tales describe German soldiers during World War I drinking from each other’s boots as a good-luck ritual before going into battle, or as an initiation for new arrivals in the trenches.
These stories are more legend than history, but they have been passed down for generations. And they clearly stuck — the boot glass remains a fixture of German beer culture to this day.
The Shoey Goes Global
In more recent times, athletes took the tradition and made it their own. Australian athletes in particular popularized what they call “the shoey” — drinking a victory beer from your own sneaker after a big win.
Dr. Liz Giuffre of the University of Technology Sydney described it this way: “It’s the whole idea that I’ve just done this really hard thing and I’m going to drink out of the shoe that got me there.”
The shoey gained traction in Australia around 2010, but it went worldwide in 2016 when Australian Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo did it on the podium after a race victory — and kept doing it. Ricciardo even had thoughts on the finer points. He preferred champagne to beer and noted that if the sparkling wine was cold, it tasted just fine. “If it’s warm,” he said, “then you might get the sweat through it, but the cold taste kills the bad stuff… so it’s delicious.”
Singer Harry Styles later joined the club, drinking from a fan’s sneaker at one of his concerts.
Is it hygienic? Probably not. Does it taste great? That depends on the shoe. But whether it is a tribute to a brilliant ballerina, a toast to battlefield courage, or a wild celebration of a hard-fought win, the tradition keeps showing up; century after century. Some things, no matter how strange, just refuse to go away.