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At Toronto museum, a walk through shoe history

An exhibition space at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.© 2015 BATA SHOE MUSEUM, TORONTO, CANADA/PHILIP CASTLETON

TORONTO — It was mid-February here — still plenty of snow on the ground. But I had a meeting, so the big waterproof boots I’d been trudging around in all winter weren’t an option. Instead, I flew up for the day wearing the polished, black, side-zip biker boots my wife bought for me nearly 20 years ago as a birthday gift, at a hip shop in San Francisco.

For every shoe there’s a story, as the curators at Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum like to say. After my meeting, I walked over to the museum’s box-shaped building in the Annex district, testing the exceptional repair work recently done by a cobbler – yes, an old-fashioned shoe cobbler – we found in Hampton, N.H., after the sole of the left boot came unglued.

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Founded in 1995, the Shoe Museum began as the private collection of Sonja Bata, wife of the late shoe manufacturer Thomas Bata. The collection now numbers more than 13,000 items spanning nearly five millennia of human history. Housed in an award-winning, five-story building designed by architect Raymond Moriyama, who was inspired by the simple shape of a shoebox, the Bata celebrates its 20th anniversary in May as one of the world’s leading resources for the study of footwear.

Why footwear? Shoes indicate changing styles, of course, but they also help unpack much more about our evolutionary path, from work and status to climate, religion, and gender issues. “We are reminded of our connections to our ancestors with each step that we take,” as one placard reads at the beginning of All About Shoes, the museum’s chronological flagship exhibit.

From ancient India, Africa, and China, to the pumps and platform shoes of 20th-century celebrities, the museum’s main gallery, on the lower level, conducts visitors on a brisk march through time. It’s a global journey, from the beak-like Dutch snavelschoen of medieval times and the spiked fumidawara, or snow shoe, of Japan to the traditional Judaic halizah shoe, a leather slipper used in a ritual that relieves a widow from the duty to marry her brother-in-law in the event of her husband’s death.

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Among the displays there’s a replica of the fur-lined, grass cord-knotted shoes found on the mummified body of Otzi the Iceman, the body of a man who lived around 3300 BC, discovered in the Alps near the border of Austria and Italy in 1991. Across the gallery sits one of the size 20EEE basketball sneakers of the NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, who began his pro career the year after Otzi was discovered.

(Though Shaq’s rookie shoe seems nearly big enough to serve as a bed for Otzi, whose mummified corpse weighed about 30 pounds, the big man had not stopped growing. He eventually wore a size 23.)

As visitors make their way through the building, current exhibits on the upper floors feature Native North American footwear and a suitably gloomy look at the “Fashion Victims” of the 19th century. Opening in May is a new exhibit exploring the role of high heels for men, from royalty and the military to cowboys and Beatle boots.

Often cited as one of the world’s more unusual museums, in fact the Bata is a serious research institution that doesn’t neglect the social impact of some of its more frivolous artifacts. In July, the Brooklyn Museum opens an exhibition called The Rise of Sneaker Culture, a look into hip-hop’s infatuation with sneakers co-organized by the Bata Shoe Museum.

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Though there’s a lot of ground to cover, Toronto is known as a great city for walking, with distinct neighborhoods, warm-weather sidewalk cafes, and a vast mix of architectural styles to gaze at. City agencies have recently collaborated to develop a comprehensive “walking strategy,” with renewed focus on public squares and parks to encourage more residents and visitors to get out of their cars and hoof it.

Very few of those hundreds of thousands of pedestrians crossing paths on the city sidewalks each day are doing so barefoot. They all made a conscious decision to pull on a pair of shoes before hitting the streets.

And each individual’s choice of footwear says something about them as soon as they poke their toe inside the door of their destination. At Toronto’s one-of-a-kind Shoe Museum, you’re invited to step outside yourself for a while and into the shoes of the whole range of humanity.


James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.