Exhibition Review: Out of Step: Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum

Introduction

A museum specializing in the display of shoes might strike the uninitiated reader as yet another in a myriad of specialty showcases that takes individual obsessions and turns them into roadside attractions for curiosity-seeking tourists. In this category one could include the Museum of Beverage Containers in Tennessee, the Potato Museum of Maryland, or the Barbed Wire Museum of Kansas. Perhaps the Bata Shoe Museum is only an upscale version of a curio cabinet but, like any attempt toward a totalizing collection of one type of thing, being there can produce a minor epiphany in the viewer who learns to appreciate the artistry of design and execution behind a lowly object typically taken for granted. That being said, there is still something disturbing and deeply ironic about a shoe museum bearing the name of a company in large part responsible for the worldwide disappearance of local, indigenous shoe-making and the spread of mass-marketed plastic substitutes.

The Bata Shoe Museum officially opened in Toronto, Canada on 6 May 1995. By odd coincidence, given the symbolic potency of shoes, that day also marked the ninety-ninth anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth. Yet this propitious conjunction (it could have yielded delightfully suggestive advertising copy) failed to be noted in any museum press notices. Instead, they zeroed in on size (a curious displacement), proclaiming the museum to be “home to the world’s largest, most comprehensive collection of shoes and shoe-related artifacts.” Located at the corner of St. George and Bloor Streets, the Bata Museum sits on the northern edge of the University of Toronto campus, and is a five-minute walk from that ship of state, the Royal Ontario Museum. And not far off are some of the most well-heeled shops in the city, showing that its founder is no novice when it comes to marketing savvy: location, after all, is everything.

Creation of the Bata Museum consummated the single-minded drive of Sonja Bata, its originator and chair of its foundation, and wife of multinational shoe manufacturer Thomas J. Bata. Prior to recent financial restructurings, their family company, Bata Limited, employed about 65,000 people, with 65 manufacturing units and 6,300 stores in 60 countries (once including Pic ‘n’ Pay in the U.S.), and sold more than one million pairs of low-priced shoes per day. It retained 9 percent of all footwear sales in Canada, although the bulk of its trade and manufacture continue to take place in many countries of the Third World. But the market dominance of this vast empire is wearing thin, enough so as to throw into question the company’s future. ¹ One-fifth of the retail outlets have been sold, and plans to shed unprofitable factories have been repeatedly proposed, only to be rejected by the senior Bata who has, since his “retirement,” thwarted the goals of successive CEOs (including his own son). In the company’s failure to relinquish manufacturing in favor of the marketing and sub-contracting strategies of new successes like Nike, can be found a morality tale which may come to haunt Sonja Bata’s autocratic approach to running her museum.

Background

The Bata family had been shoemakers for eight generations when Tomas Bata began Bata Industries in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1894. He transformed the family’s local trade into an expanding industry, following on the philosophies and production-line practices of American industrialists such as Henry Ford. The relationship between the business and its workers was paternalistic, and driven by a modernist belief in progress. Before his accidental death in 1932, Bata had laid the groundwork for the expansion of his footwear industry into the colonies of Europe. His son Thomas J. Bata continued and expanded upon Bata’s global mission to “shoe the world.” ² By manufacturing cheap shoes of plastic or locally available materials, Bata aimed to saturate Third World markets, and in the process the company wiped out small, local, traditional producers and replaced them...