About The Museum
Welcome to the BSM!
Discover the treasures of North America’s inspiring, charming shoe museum.
Located in Toronto, Canada, the Bata Shoe Museum regularly displays over a thousand shoes and related artefacts, chosen from a collection of nearly 15,000 objects, in architect Raymond Moriyama’s iconic, award-winning building. The BSM celebrates the style, development and function of footwear across four impressive galleries, with displays ranging from Chinese bound-foot shoes and ancient Egyptian sandals to chestnut-crushing clogs and glamorous platforms. Over 4,500 years of history are reflected in our permanent exhibition, All About Shoes while our three other galleries feature changing exhibitions – so there’s always something new to see.
How a Personal Passion Grew Into An Internationally Acclaimed Collection
Sonja Bata’s involvement in the global shoe industry enabled her to build one of the world’s finest collections and to create North America’s foremost shoe museum. Within our stunning building lies a wealth of fashion lore and invaluable information.
Shoes are an indication of personal taste and style. Yet shoes can also tell us much about the world’s technological development, and can mark shifts in society’s attitudes and values. Footwear illustrates entire ways of life, reflecting climate, religious beliefs and the development of trades, and how attitudes to gender and social status changed through the ages.
In 1979, when Mrs. Bata’s private collection had outgrown its home, the Bata family established the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation. Over the years the Foundation funded fieldwork to collect and research footwear in communities where traditions are changing rapidly – notably North America’s Indigenous cultures and circumpolar groups in Canada, Siberia, Alaska and Greenland. These field studies have resulted in many academic publications for the Foundation, from The Typology of Native Footwear to Spirit of Siberia: Traditional Native Life, Clothing and Footwear.
The main objective of the Foundation, however, was to establish an international centre for footwear research. The result was the Bata Shoe Museum, with its unrivalled collection of over 14,000 shoes and related objects.
On May 6, 1995, the Bata Shoe Museum opened its doors at 327 Bloor Street West in downtown Toronto, in an iconic building designed by Moriyama and Teshima Architects. As a unique, world-class specialized museum, it has become a major destination point for visitors and residents alike.
The BSM Collection
The mission of the Bata Shoe Museum is to communicate the central role of footwear in the shaping the social and cultural life of humanity. Through acquiring, conserving, researching, interpreting and exhibiting material evidence of the history of footwear and shoemaking, the museum illustrates the changing habits, lifestyles, culture and customs of the world’s inhabitants. The BSM’s international collection of nearly 15,000 artefacts spans 4,500 years of history.
The Bata Shoe Museum is home to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of shoes and footwear-related objects. In addition, it is an internationally recognized centre for footwear research that sponsors field research, publishes research findings and promotes education.
At present, the permanent collection contains artefacts from virtually every culture in the world. Where else could you find French chestnut-crushing boots under the same roof as delicately-embroidered Chinese silk shoes, bear fur shoes made for Japanese samurai warriors and footwear made from human hair?
The debut of the chopine occurred during the Renaissance and is closely associated with Venice and Spain. Chopines were inspired by footwear of the Near East where Venice had holdings and a thriving trade, but was still the footwear of choice for many wealthy women at the beginning of the 17th century. Highly impractical, the chopine's primary purpose was to make the wearer stand out and therefore was perfectly suited for extravagant and expensive embellishment
Seal skin boots made in the southern part of the Caribou Inuit region feature narrow leg sections and simple geometric designs. Hair direction and designs flow horizontally on women's boots and vertically on men's. These women's haired seal skin kamiks with triangle inlay design were made by Judith Akpaliak.
These shoes, worn by Queen Victoria, are virtually identical to the pair she wore to her wedding. They also date to 1840, the year of her wedding. This pair, like her wedding shoes, is embellished with ribbon applique and has very delicate elastic across the instep.
The design of this pair of sandals is simple yet practical. Indeed, the contemporary flip-flop is a clear descendant of this type of ancient sandal. This pair is missing the original thong that would have secured the soles to the foot.
Acclaimed Canadian ceramic artist, Marilyn Levine, crafted these steel-toed worked boots out of clay. Her remarkable ability to craft three dimensional works of trompe l'oeil in clay has garnered her international acclaim. The contrast between the reality of the hard fired ceramic and the image it projects as a comfortable well worn pair of leather boots is intriguing.
Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood began to design shoes because she couldn't find anything flamboyant to complement her daring theatrical ensembles. Many of her shoes feature exceptionally high heels such as these 'moc croc' platform shoes with 22cm high heels.
Highlights From The Collection
A rare and well-preserved velvet-covered platform chopine from 16th-century Italy is one of the great treasures of the museum’s fashion footwear collection, which ranges chronologically from the Italian Renaissance to the catwalks of today’s designers. This chopine – so tall that the wearer could not walk unaided – provides an interesting introduction to other equally outrageous shoe styles introduced over the centuries. Salvatore Ferragamo and Vivienne Westwood weren’t the first designers to think of platforms; nor, if history teaches us anything, will they be the last.
One of the most important aspects of the BSM’s holdings is an extensive collection ofIndigenous NorthAmerican and circumpolar footwear. This collection, along with the fieldwork commissioned to study indigenous shoemaking, have greatly contributed to the scholarship of shoes.
Among the collection’s most popular features is an extensive assortment of celebrity footwear, including Queen Victoria’s ballroom slippers, Robert Redford’s cowboy boots, Elton John’s monogrammed silver platform boots, Terry Fox’s running shoe, Elvis Presley’s blue patent loafers, Karen Kain’s ballet shoes and John Lennon’s Beatle boot.
The museum’s archaeological collection includes footwear from some of the earliest civilizations on earth: ancient Egyptian sarcophagi with painted sandal designs, leg-shaped perfume vials made by an ancient Greek potter, and Roman bronze lamps representing sandal-clad feet. The collection also includes intriguing examples of medieval footwear.
But the BSM’s collection doesn’t stop at shoes. We also have a companion collection of shoe-shaped ornamental artefacts such as majolica hand-warmers and inlaid fruitwood snuffboxes, as well as graphic material from 14th-century woodcut prints and 19th-century caricature lithographs to original paintings and sculptures.
A passionate collector, philanthropist, world traveller and business leader, Sonja Bata dedicated her life to learning and discovery.
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, to a prominent family of lawyers, Sonja Bata (née Wettstein) studied architecture before her academic career was interrupted by her marriage to the heir of a global shoe manufacturing and retail empire, Czech‐Canadian Thomas Bata, when she was not yet 20 years of age.
Working side by side with Thomas, Sonja Bata travelled the world for Bata shoes. Her business sense and passion for design allowed her to grow her professional role within the company, and she became an invaluable business partner for her husband.
