Destination: Canada : Shoe Enough, a New Museum

Why does it tickle a person so to learn that there’s a museum of the shoe? Do we think our shoes somehow unworthy of the honor, no more than scuffed castaways in the yard sale of history? Is it that our feet lend their shods such an awkward shape? Is it the humble intimacy of one’s own two feet? The olfactory association? The specter of toe-sucking?

We may never know the answer. Nevertheless the world now has its first state-of-the-arch museum devoted to footwear: the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

The glass doors of this multimillion-dollar variation on a shoe box swung open to the public on May 6 and the first of many curious thousands roamed four levels of the museum, inspecting, frowning, giggling, pointing at shoes of the dead and famous. And as they put themselves mentally into the shoes of their ancestors, it seemed that no one failed to observe that our forebears walked on rather small feet.

The museum’s Swiss-born founder and inspiration, Sonja Bata, began studying and collecting historical and novelty footwear half a century ago when she married her own fortune to the future one her Czech-born husband, Thomas J. Bata, would amass as cobbler to the postwar masses. Bata Ltd., the global shoe company, is headquartered here, where the Batas settled.

As Sonja Bata’s shoe collection grew to Imelda-cular proportions over the decades, her persistent dream was to build a permanent home for what she calls “a center of knowledge about the role of footwear in the social and cultural life of mankind.”

Bata, 68, declared in an interview: “Shoes hold the key to human identity. They tell you more than any other artifact about people’s status, climate, work and culture. . . . By looking at the shoe, you know who the person was.”

This museum takes itself as seriously as its totem will allow. The Bata Shoe Museum Foundation paid one of Canada’s most distinguished architects, Raymond Moriyama, to make a statement about shoes and shoemaking on a tight corner at one end of Toronto’s midtown fashion ave, Bloor Street. Sonja Bata hired a scholarly director from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Edward Maeder, whose productions there included the two crowd-pleasers “Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film” and “Salvatore Ferragamo: Shoemaker of Dreams.”

Canada’s leading literary eminence, Robertson Davies, supplied a motto (“ Per Saecula Gradatum -- One Step at a Time”). “Shoe Week” was declared in Toronto and an admiring round of press notices greeted the opening of the museum.

Just inside the door, you almost trip over the permanent principal exhibit, a replica of 3,700-year-old footprints, with Neil Armstrong’s one-small-step moon riff printed just above. We move between these seminal walkers through just a tiny sample of the 10,000 pairs of shoes and shoe artifacts in the Bata collection, beginning with the most humble sandals and fragile funerary footwear of yore and accelerating quickly to the opulent and the weird.

Within a few paces of venerable Ashanti ceremonial flip-flops are monster white clown shoes; spiked French chestnut-crushing clogs and accordion-ankled Hungarian dancing boots; rubber-tire sandals from India and cloven-footed camel-riders’ boots from Nigeria; Australian aboriginal executioners’ human-hair slippers and Queen Victoria’s ballroom slippers.

It makes you want to sit and rest your feet. While you do, ponder these factoids:

* A quarter of all the bones in the human body are in the feet.

* During the early part of the Industrial Revolution, when shoes were first mass produced, only the rich, with their custom boot makers, could buy rights and lefts. Everyone else wore painfully interchangeable “pairs” of shoes.

* Shoes may be the next-to-last item of clothing you would want to wear secondhand, but Napoleon had his boots broken in by underlings.

* Women are four times as likely to develop foot trouble as men.

You may know already that wooden shoes, or sabots in the French, gave their name to sabotage when peasants threw their shoes into mill machinery to express their grievances during the French Revolution. The Bata Museum has a pair of ingenious sabots used by gunrunners during World War II: The bottoms are carved with a “heel” on the front and a “toe” at the back so that pursuers will imagine their wearers have gone in the opposite direction.

The U.S. Army tried similar sleight of foot during the Vietnam War, Bata says, pointing out a boot whose rubber sole had been carved to leave a much smaller “Vietnamese” footprint.

On the way out of the main exhibit is a celebrity corner where Sonja Bata’s pedestrian quest has yielded shoes once worn by Pablo Picasso, Buddy Holly, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Elton John, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon and a famous Canadian horse named Big Ben, among many others.

The Bata Shoe Museum is located at 327 Bloor St. West; telephone (416) 979-7799. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for seniors and students, $2 for children 5-14.