A High-Heeled Shoe-In for Bata

Shoe lovers unite for the All About Shoes exhibit being featured at Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum — because, well, it’s all about shoes.

While the Bata Shoe Museum is great for any shoe lover because of its wide array of collections and approximately 12,500 artifacts, the All About Shoes exhibit is geared for those fashionistas who love to celebrate the changing styles that have defined cultures, runways and red carpets.

It takes the viewers on a journey through 4,500 years of ever-evolving footwear that have been admired for their creativity, material and production. This semi-permanent gallery features everything from ancient funerary sandals to past celebrities’ haute couture pumps.

The exhibit shares compelling stories by using footwear as a point of entry, and comprises sections that flow from one to another seamlessly. Some new stories on display are “The Ancients,” “Shoes and Status,” “Shoes and Religion,” “Fashion of Foot,” “Small Soles to Tall Tales,” “What’s their Line?” and “Star Turns.”

“What’s their Line?” focuses on footwear worn for specific occupations people had throughout history. Artifacts include the French chestnut crushing clog, a deep sea diver’s boot and a Japanese sumo wrestler’s geta.

While “What’s their Line?” focuses on the gritty uses of footwear, “Small to Soles to Tall Tales” and “Star Turns” delve into shoes’ beauty and extravagant stories. The “Small Soles to Tall Tales” section is a hit with children who visit because it features shoes from famous fairytales, like Cinderella and The Old Lady who Lived in a Shoe. The “Star Turns” section displays a wide range of celebrity footwear that includes Picasso, Terry Fox, Gerri Halliwell and Mike Myers’ shoes.

Overall, visitors can expect to see numerous creative and inventive shoes originating from different cultures at different time periods. Senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack says that her favourite artifact is a paduka in the All About Shoes gallery.

Paduka are a traditional form of Indian footwear that is stilted on either end of the foot bed, creating a bridge structure so that the majority of the wearer’s sole doesn’t touch the ground. The wearer holds the paduka on his or her feet by placing the toe knob in between the big and second toe.

What's really interesting about the paduka that Semmelhack admires is that the toe knob was sculpted as a lotus blossom that has a small hole in the middle, which leads to a mechanism that is hidden under the paduka. At the back of the paduka is a button, which is pushed when the person wearing the shoe steps down. 

When it is pushed, the mechanism forces perfumed water through the shoe and out of the lotus blossom, so that with every step the wearer takes, he or she leaves perfumed steps behind. "I think it's a brilliant invention... something I'd love a contemporary designer to revive," says Semmelhack.

Even though visiting the exhibit at the Bata Shoe Museum in a pair of your favourite shoes and with a bunch of your girlfriends is the best, it’s not always possible especially with a jam-packed summer schedule. So, you can do the next best thing by visiting the All About Shoes exhibit online to experience some of these spectacular shoes in their image gallery, some of which are in 3D.•

All About Shoes is a semi-permanent exhibit and is open all year round.

All images copyright of The Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Canada