The shoe was almost five hundred years old.

Small, made for a child, it carried tiny punched patterns across its surface. Elizabeth Semmelhack had seen thousands of shoes during her years at the Bata Shoe Museum, but something about this one collapsed the distance between centuries.

The pattern reminded her of a pair of shoes she had bought for her daughter at Target.

One child belonged to Elizabeth’s world. The other had vanished nearly five centuries ago.

She knew how an art historian was trained to approach an object: Who made it? When? Where? What did its design reveal about its time?

But those were not the questions that came to her.

Who was this child?

Where had those small feet walked?

Had the child grown up?

Who had they become?

There was no answer.

The child's name had vanished. The streets were gone, the footsteps gone, and perhaps every memory of that life was lost. And yet the shoe remained, still carrying something unusually intimate: the impression of the foot that had once filled it.

Elizabeth had not expected to spend her life thinking about shoes.

Her academic background was in Japanese art history. She studied eighteenth-century prints and the intersections of economics, fashion and gender. Footwear was not part of the plan.

Then her mother went to an event for women in business at the Bata Shoe Museum.

She heard Sonja Bata speak, saw the museum, and called Elizabeth that night.

She had found the perfect place for her daughter to work.

Elizabeth was not convinced.

Three months later, a curator position appeared. She applied almost on a whim—partly, she later joked, so she could tell her mother that she had listened.

Then she met Sonja Bata.

She got the job.

That was in 2000.

Twenty-six years later, she is still here.

Sonja had found her way to shoes differently.

The Bata company had begun in Zlín, then part of Austria-Hungary (and later Czechoslovakia). In 1939, Thomas J. Bata moved to Canada with about 100 Czech families. After the Second World War, Sonja, who was Swiss, joined him here, and together they began rebuilding a company that had once operated factories around the world.

Sonja travelled.

And everywhere she went, she noticed something simple.

Human feet were much the same.

What humans put on them was astonishingly different.

She began collecting.

A few shoes became hundreds. Hundreds became thousands. Eventually, someone suggested that the collection had perhaps become something larger.

A museum.

Toronto became its home.

Today, the Bata Shoe Museum holds close to fifteen thousand artifacts and continues to collect. Its mission is enormous for a place devoted to something found at the bottom of the human body: to tell the history of humanity through footwear.

But Elizabeth has learned that a shoe is rarely only a shoe.

“Nothing is just made,” she says. “Everything is made for a why.”

Sometimes the why is work. Sometimes climate. Sometimes gender, religion, fashion or belonging.

And sometimes it is wealth.

Elizabeth has spent years researching chopines, a form of platform footwear that became extraordinary in Renaissance Venice, though the history of platform footwear stretches back to ancient Greece.

Women wore them beneath their dresses.

Why wear such towering shoes if almost nobody could see them?

Because greater height allowed for longer skirts.

Longer skirts required more fabric.

More fabric meant more expensive clothing.

And in Venice, women’s clothing was one of the principal ways families displayed wealth.

Suddenly, the strange shoe hidden beneath a dress was no longer simply about fashion.

It was about money.

Class.

Gender.

A family announcing its place in the world.

Perhaps that is why Elizabeth has always found the idea of a museum “just about shoes” strange.

In the early 2000s, she remembers people asking whether the Bata Shoe Museum was a museum for women. Shoes had become so feminized in popular culture that some men seemed almost nervous about entering.

Elizabeth found that amusing.

Men did not, after all, walk around barefoot.

Sometimes those same visitors emerged surprised.

Oh, they would say.

It’s actually a history museum.

The shoes had not changed.

Only what people could see in them had.

Yet Elizabeth is careful not to give objects powers they do not possess.

A shoe cannot replace a written document. An object separated from its history can mislead as easily as it can illuminate. Without context, she points out, someone might look at an astronaut’s boot without ever understanding that it was made for an astronaut.

The past does not explain itself.

Maybe that's why the little child's shoe never responded to her questions.

It could preserve the shape of a foot.

It could prove that someone had been there.

But it could not tell her who.

And someday, our shoes will face the same questions.

Elizabeth sometimes wonders what people a hundred years from now will understand about us from what we leave behind.

They may find it strange that industrialization moved humans away from things made for their individual bodies and placed them inside standardized sizes. Elizabeth does not wear Elizabeth-sized shoes.

She wears size ten.

But there may be another, less charming legacy.

Today, humanity produces around 20 billion pairs of shoes every year—more than 2 new pairs for every person on Earth.

Perhaps the shoes of our time will speak of abundance.

Or perhaps they will speak of excess.

Of a civilization that learned how to make almost anything, almost anywhere, in almost unimaginable quantities—and then had to confront what all that making cost the planet.

Elizabeth believes this may change. Technology might return us to footwear designed for individual bodies. Shoes could become local, biodegradable, and less wasteful.

The museum, meanwhile, continues to collect.

And Elizabeth continues to look down.

She notices Jordans. Birkenstocks. Work boots. Sneakers. The choices people make about their feet.

After twenty-six years, she has learned that shoes can reveal the groups people wish to belong to, the identities they construct, even the values they hope others will recognize.

So yes, Elizabeth looks at people’s shoes.

But for twenty-six years, she has also been looking at us—the shoes that surround her in this museum.

She has researched us, measured us, traced our histories. She has asked who made us, who wore us, why we were made, and what we might still reveal about people who disappeared long before she arrived.

She has walked these rooms year after year, telling our stories to strangers.

Some of us came from distant places. Some have survived centuries. Some once carried workers, children, women and men whose names have been lost. One of us belonged to a child almost five hundred years ago—the little shoe that reminded Elizabeth of the pair she had bought for her own daughter.

She has spent years wondering about that child.

Who was it?

Where did those small feet walk?

Did the child grow up?

She does not know.

Neither do we.

There are things even we cannot remember.

But there is something Elizabeth may never have thought to ask.

What have we learned about her?

We have watched her walk these rooms.

We have listened to her questions.

We have heard her tell our stories again and again.

We know the sound of her footsteps.

We know the questions that keep bringing her back.

We know that after all these years, she is still curious about people she will never meet.

Elizabeth knows a great deal about us.

Perhaps she does not yet know how much we know about her.

After all, humans are not the only ones who leave traces behind.

They leave them on us.

And sometimes, without realizing it, they leave them with us.

YF, August 17, 2026

This narrative is based on an interview with Elizabeth Semmelhack, Director and Senior Curator of the Bata Shoe Museum, whose insights and stories form the foundation of this piece.