Toronto - Bata Shoe Museum

http://www.batashoemuseum.com/

The Bata Shoe Museum was not featured in It's an Aardvark Eat Turtle World and it was not in the Toronto City Pass, so it would have been very easy for me to have never known about. Fortunately, it was featured on the double-decker bus tour, and the construction of the building alone, designed to be reminiscent of a shoebox, lured me in.

I know there are people who are wild about shoes. I am not one of those people, therefore this review is based on the strength of the museum itself, and not as a special interest observer. Though, if your special interest is shoes, I do not doubt there is a level of ecstasy that this museum will provide, and that's cool.

For everyone else, the strength of the museum has to be not just in its collection, but in how the collection is presented and made relevant. This was several years ago, and removed from that, I remember the historical development of the shoe including types of shoes used for specific purposes that I would never have thought about without going.

That is pretty good, but I also happened to run into this article this week:

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/deadly-victorian-fashions/

Fashion is not the only way of looking at shoes, but it is a relevant one, and that exhibit sounds fascinating, both historical and timely. So even though in my initial plan I was going to do the Royal Ontario Museum this week and the Bata Shoe Museum next week, I changed it so that if I could possibly offer a little signal boost to this exhibit four days before it opens, I would.

Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century opens June 18th and will run through June 2016.

If you get a chance to go, you should.