As the clock soared past 10 p.m. the other night, inside the lower sanctum of the Bata Shoe Museum, the churros were flowing in one corner, social media feeds were being sated before a saloon-style backdrop in another. A “queer line dance” troupe known as SPURS appeared to hoedown in the very centre.
The remainders of the party — celebrating the 30th anniversary of the singular Toronto museum at the corner of Bloor and St. George? A blur of dungareed Village People pretenders and others in their cowboy and cowgirl finest.
Giddy up? The soiree was also ushering in the latest show at the Bata: an exhibition titled “Rough & Ready: A History of the Cowboy Boot.” It’s a sprawling, assumptions-defying look at that particular article of footwear that loops back to the “early heels” of riding shoes in Persia; gives way to the Wellington, which gained popularity in the 19th century (and was named after British military hero the Duke of Wellington); covers the style that emerged with the rise of Western movies; and explores the appropriation that followed, courtesy of shows like “Dallas” in the 1980s, and the way Ralph Lauren mixed and matched.
The heroine of the night was Sonja Bata, who has been gone for seven years and was being represented by young generations of Batas, including daughter Christine Bata Schmidt, grandson Victor Schmidt, granddaughter Alexandra Weston and her son Graydon.
As much as the night was a celebration of all things cowboy, it was also clearly a posthumous valentine to Sonja, the woman who birthed the museum, and who died at 91 in 2018. Born in Switzerland, an architect by training, she was wed to the Czech-sprung Thomas Bata, dubbed “shoemaker to the world’” in the headline of his own 2008 New York Times obituary.
Obsessed with shoes — their meaning, the art behind them — the cerebral socialite took to collecting them. And by the time her vision of a museum was complete, it amounted to 15,000 artifacts spanning 4,500 years.
“Some of these kids weren’t alive when Sonja opened this museum,” a seasoned party-prowler told me, looking out at the guests. It’s true.
It was 1995. The O.J. Simpson trial was in its throes, Quebec was gearing up for its referendum on sovereignty, “Braveheart” was storming the theatres, and dot-com domains were just beginning to be scooped up for this strange new thing called the internet.
The very year, the no-nonsense Mrs. Bata — wearing black, medium-heel Mary Janes — formally opened her glorious museum on a Saturday in May. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, and meant to evoke a shoe box, it was, as the Star wrote at the time, “the first museum of its kind in the Western hemisphere.” Still is.
“Some people buy yachts or Rolls-Royces. But my husband and I couldn’t care less about that,” she said then. “Shoes are the most exciting artifact. They tell you more about human beings, the way they lived, their climates and their history.’’
Her gift to Canada has bloomed in a variety of ways, high and low, since: visits by Christian Louboutin, and the only North American stop for a Manolo Blahnik exhibition; the first showcase of the history of sneakers, in 2013; and amusing exhibitions like one built around men in heels. The larger collection includes everything from the Apollo astronauts’ space boots to Elizabeth Taylor’s silver Halston sandals from “Cleopatra” to Queen Victoria’s ballroom slippers. A more recent queenly addition: shoes worn by Priyanka, season-one winner of “Canada’s Drag Race.”
Living in the same building as she did in her later years, just down from the museum, I saw first-hand that Bata’s enthusiasm never waned. “Shoes are even more interesting to me now,” she once matter-of-facted to me in the elevator. She continued to go to “the office” almost until the end.
Leaving her shrine to shoes after the party, I had to smile. Surely, Sonja would have gotten a kick out of the urban cowboys and girls running amok in her museum.
The Bata, it keeps afoot.
