Today’s guest is Elizabeth Semmhack, the director of a Museum, and not just any Museum but one that I hold particularly close to my heart: The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada. 

The reason it’s close to my heart is because it was founded by my late grandmother Sonja Bata. In 1946, she married my grandfather who was rebuilding his family’s footwear business. Together, they travelled the world and through these travels, she developed a passion for collecting historic shoes that best represented their cultures and environments. After decades of travelling, she’d accumulated a collection of shoes and as one does, in 1995, she founded this museum.

If ever you’re in Toronto, I really recommend the Bata Shoe Museum, it’s an amazing institution and today the Museum has a collection of over 15,000 pairs, with footwear from all eras and regions. One of my grandmother’s passions was the Arctic regions of northern Canada, and so there’s an amazing collection of circumpolar footwear from local indigenous groups from that region, with whom the Museum works regularly to maintain, preserve and showcase that shoe-making heritage. 

Elizabeth Semmelhack has published several excellent coffee-table books that show the Museum’s collection. In this interview, I discuss with her the role of footwear in societies, as shown through the great books that she’s put together. In this episode, we discuss sneakers, circumpolar boots, virtual footwear and many others.

In this episode, we talked about the following books:

Out of the Box by Elizabeth Semmelhack

The World At Your Feet: Bata Show Museum, 2019

Future Now by Elizabeth Semmelhack

A Taste for China by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins

Precious Bane by Mary Bane

Visit the Bata Shoe Museum: https://batashoemuseum.ca/

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