It seems that we’re not having a cultural conversation about shoes at the moment.
Shoes get the most attention during good times, booming times, the bull market of the 1980s gave us Imelda Marcos; the 1990s begat Carrie in Sex and the City. Oh certainly, we’re still buying shoes, and in addition to the point in economic downturns, people have trouble affording shoes. This is not as much fun as rabble who have unreasonable number of shoes, or insanely expensive shoes, and in the way that the chatter about shoes has subsided.
When I was in community, in central New York State, I worked at a discount shoe store at the mall. At that proper time, there was a very ample return address, you could return shoes for any reason, without limitation of any kind.  And so, several times a week, a customer would approach me at my post behind the register, with an empty shoebox in possession. They’d inadequate on the reckoner while they took their shoes off, plopping them one at a time into the waiting chest. Stocking footed, they’d suppose things like, “these shoes didn’t fit,†or “I didn’t like themâ€. And I would need to reach into the shoe, still warm and redolent, in order to slightly bend out the side to find the SKU number printed on the inside, by some means apparently impervious to wear. I would enter it into the make a record of, which would spit out the shoe’s current price– usually $5, the lowest price at which we sold adult shoes. They could use this as store credit, and they’d pad over to the bottom racks to find a pair that fit — we almost always had a few pairs in each size. I’d enter the transaction in the register as a matter of bookkeeping, no money would make divergent hands.It was really something of a shoe investment scheme, a way of flipping their shoe purchase so that they retained five dollars worth of permanent shoe equity.
I don’t begrudge them this now — the poverty in that part of New York state was extreme at the time and probably is worse today. But I have to admit that I didn’t like it much at all back hereafter. These customers never looked in any way distressed or confused or concerned by their outright lies to me, or by their flouting the spirit of the regularity, if not the letter. Now, I’m not sure that I cared almost the system much either, in the way of hourly employees everywhere, I felt vaguely screwed over by my employer. Mostly I didn’t analogous reaching into someone’s disagreeable keen shoes. Before I graduated from college, the policy had changed, imposing a occasion limit on returns and the need for a receipt and I presume the shoe-flipping came to an end.
Anyway, as soon as I heard about the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, I wanted to go. Besides my quasi-professional experience, I liking shoes a lot – which being offspring-bearing is something of a cliché, the gender exlusivity of which I shall soon judicial. I also be pleased with smaller, single-topic museums, they strike me as the physical manifestation of an dissertation, in which you can unravel a single topic to gain insight onto great number other subjects, if not everything in the world.
The Bata Shoe Museum did not foil. Its immutable recover one’s self-possession includes footwear from great number different cultures and over 4,500 years of story. You learn a haphazard about adaptation to circumstances – the shoes that most of us wear today are designed for contact through even floors and pavement, but some of the weirder looking shoes speak to other terrains and purposes: the dangerous, spiked clogs used up for chestnut-crushing in France in circa 1800-1900; the jikatabi, a boot that looks like a mitten with two fingers worn by Japanese electricians, the nalin or kabkab worn in Turkey in public bathhouses to avoid junction through hot and wet floors. (See pictures here.)
And, I’morning meal argue, you could learn a little something about men, too, specially those that tend to bluster about men not caring about shoes, because men never have and never will — a thought to which Bata cleanly puts the lie. For instance, the museum maintains a collection of shoes made by Native Americans, and while shoemaking and embellishing in these communities is almost always a women’s art, Zuni wedding boots, are traditionally made for the bridegroom for his bride, out of a bleached deerskin. It’s a tradition that is echoed in the Netherlands, where a man would carve clogs for his betrothed, and in France, where hand-carved clogs were a traditional Christmas Eve gift of love. (See all these shoes hither.)
Oh fine, making shoes is many from wearing them. But if you look back into history, as luck may have it for a time when men were verily men, such men did not find reason to eschew nice shoes. For prompting, in the early 19th century Europe, for men and particularly men of means wore intricate and gaze-worthy footwear, more as flamboyant as preening peacocks. By comparison, women’s shoes of the hour of travail were boring, covered by dint of. all those long skirts, and by further comparison, men’s shoes of today are drab and funereal. (With the exception of Elton John’s shoes, also on parade at the museum, although presumably the elaborate shoes from days of yore did not make an obvious pique about masculinity, virility, sexuality of their wearer.)
Nearly every piece of literature about the museum flags any composition of its collection considered in the state of being of particular interest to men: Napoleon’s silk socks. They are interesting sufficiency, limit in the end, they’re only socks. And since we now know that in one place or another, deeply (and in some cases, I’ll grant, seemingly irretrievably) encoded in the DNA of every man is a secret fascination with shoes, possibly these socks are a cover for reeling men into the museum.
And, if you’ll allow me to speculate still further, perhaps, when the economy picks up anew, our next cultural conversation about shoes last will and testament have a man as its muse.
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