sonia rodriguez’ rhinestone-adorned pointe shoes, which she wore during a production of james kudelka’s cinderella in may 2oo8 . on display at the bata shoe museum.
The Bata Show Museum is a museum of footwear and calceology (the study of footwear) in Toronto, Canada.
At the lowest level of the museum is its permanent exhibition, All About Shoes, which takes you through over 4,500 years of history. It begins with Ötzi’s shoes. Ötzi is the naturally mummified remains of a man who lived some time between 3350 and 3150 B.C., and the shoes he wore were made of bearskin and stuffed with hay. The museum had a recreation of these shoes.
Next in this exhibition is about the Ancient Egyptians and their shoes. A label reads:
Egypt’s hot climate meant that sandals were the most common type of footwear. Typically, they were made from leather, straw, or plant leaves, but privileged individuals wore sandals constructed out of precious metals.
The second photograph is of a cartonnage (Ancient Egyptian, 300 B.C.E. to 1 C.E.). Cartonnage is a type of material used in ancient Egyptian funeral preparation, and it is made of layers of linen or papyrus covered with plaster. In this specific piece, “the underside depicts conquered enemies painted on the soles of the sandals.”
The numbered footwear are described as such:
Cartonnage made of linen and gesso and depicting sandaled feet for the mummy (Ancient Egyptian, 1–200 C.E.)
Pair of sandals missing its original thong (Ancient Egyptian, 1500–1200 B.C.E.)
Coptic mules from Upper Egypt made from red leather and embossed with geometric designs (Coptic, 300–500 C.E.)
It seems you're all in love with historical shoes and the Bata Museum (honestly, same), sooooo let me tell you that on May 24th, they'll have a conversation with Avalon Forheringham, curator for the South Asian textiles and dress collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Live. On Zoom. For Free.
FOR FREE.
You all just need to register via THIS LINK, or though the link in bio of their instagram.
Here Are The World’s Most Extraordinary Shoe Designs, Shared On Virtual Shoe Museum By Liza Snook
"Project by Tran Ngoc Yen for the Faculty of Multimedia Communications, Shoe Design Studio, 2017.
Material: leather, wood and a red apple.
Snow White is a 19th-century German fairy tale that is today known widely across the Western world. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The name Sneewittchen was Low German and in the first version it was translated with Schneeweißchen. The Grimms completed their final revision of the story in 1854. The fairy tale features such elements as the magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the glass coffin, and the characters of the evil queen and the Seven Dwarfs.
The one about hardships of travel. I know that in Valjean’s case, they serve as a sign, discouraging him from persisting in his attempts to reach the trial in Arras, but all these hindrances were everyday reality of travel before widespread railway connections. As someone immersed in researching nineteenth-century travel and travel literature, I find this chapter to be a beautiful illustration of how unpleasant, tedious, and exhausting the journeys used to be. They were real ordeals.
Before railways, travel was riddled with challenges. Delays and disruptions were part of the everyday reality. If something went awry, travellers could find themselves stranded for hours or even days in the middle of nowhere. On muddy roads, carriages could become severely stuck, requiring coachmen to wear special boots over their regular footwear to extricate the carriage from the mud (you can see the picture of such boots below).
Valjean, fortunately, encounters assistance in the place where he gets stuck. The story about post-horses being used for ploughing is so interesting! I haven’t heard about anything like this from the sources. Valjean, seemingly making every effort to ensure the continuation of his journey, obviously feels relief when faced with insurmountable obstacles, interpreting it as an act of Providence. And he is very frustrated when his problem with a carriage is solved by an old woman with a boy. Therefore, he is furious with the boy who found a carriage for him. The passive-aggressive reaction to the boy echoes shades of the old Valjean, reminiscent of the period before his transformative encounter with the bishop. It seems that Providence wants him to be in Arras on time for the trial.