FASHION Magazine

Sonja Bata fell head over heels for shoes in the while travelling the world in the 1940s and discovered her passion for collecting “rare and traditional” shoes. Since then, she built a collection of over 13,000 shoes, spanning over 4,500 years of footwear from all over the world. After collecting 10,000 pairs of shoes in her […]

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MANOLO BLAHNIK: THE ART OF SHOES, the exhibition spanning five decades of the shoe designer’s impressive career, has already made pit stops in Milan, Russia, Prague and Madrid but it has been announced that the final stop on its worldwide run will be at Toronto’s singular Bata Shoe Museum. Blahnik began his career in 1970, the […]

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Last night, one of Toronto’s architectural gems was done up to the nines in celebration of 20 years at the helm of shoe history. Opened in 1995, the Bata Shoe Museum, is still the only footwear-dedicated museum worldwide, housing everything from prehistoric clogs to poisonous heels and adding glittery glam rock platforms to the mix […]

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10 of the deadliest fashions of the 19th Century »

Oh, the things we do for fashion. While the connection between pain and beauty seems as strong as ever today, the truth is that women have been suffering for style since well before the corset days. Today, Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum opens Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19^th Century, an exhibit that looks back at some of the most dangerous dresses, shoes and accessories of the Victorian era.

Much like the advances that came a century later with the advent of American sportswear in the 1920s, the Industrial Revolution saw a number of drastic changes to they way women dressed, including flats, high-waisted skirts and loose dresses. Not all of these changes came easy though; “The problem with flats is that they were incredibly narrow and they were made as straights, which means that pairs of shoes did not have distinct lefts or rights,” says Bata’s senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack. What’s more, many were dyed with hyper-poisonous arsenic, a chemical that while responsible for some of the most vibrant hues of the day, could kill.

Who says all trends come from the street or runway? Ever since Diana Vreeland invented the blockbuster fashion exhibition during her tenure as a special consultant to the Met’s Costume Institute, curators has kept the fashion-as-art conversation going with the re-discovery of forgotten designers or historical eras. “I try to curate shows that have a relevance to what’s happening in contemporary culture,” explained Andrew Bolton, curator of the Met’s newly renamed Anna Wintour Costume Center, to Another Magazine. “The power of fashion lies in its power to transform identity. So I try to fit in ideas with the zeitgeist.”

This year, fashion curators are pulling together a number of different zeitgeist threads. The Met, for instance, will be swapping the safety pins and Vivienne Westwood bondage gear from last year’s “Punk” exhibition for a retrospective devoted to Charles James, one of the first American couturiers who was, according to the late Cristobal Balenciaga, “the world’s best and only dressmaker who has raised it from an applied art to a pure art form.” Known as a difficult genius who made clients wait for their orders—or become so attached to his pieces that he’d refuse to hand them over at all—the designer was a blueprint for some of today’s best talents.

With the rise of Spring 2014’s art-inspired runway trend, what better time to learn about five game-changing fashion curators as well as a hint at some of the 2014 fashion exhibitions that may lead style conversations this year.

See the party photos »

Heels may always take top fashion honours, but sneakers are most definitely the shoes of the last century. On Thursday night, they were officially inducted into shoe history with the opening of Bata Shoe Museum’s Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture, the first exhibit of its kind in North America. Beginning with ultimate function’s first pair made in 1873 (they were called plimsoles at the time), the exhibit features everything from the iconic— Nike Dunk Supremes—to the hyper fashionable—Pierre Hardy’s Poworama sneakers.

Matching the exhibit’s out of the box theme, the museum had Toronto-born and internationally lauded industrial designer Karim Rashid, who is known to collect a sneaker or two himself, design the exhibit. In signature monochrome (this time it was head-to-toe white) Rashid kicked off the exhibit alongside the museum’s iconic founder, Sonja Bata and FASHION’s editor in chief, Bernadette Morra. After taking in a break dancing performance from Unity Charity, the crowd, which included persistent girl about town, Jen Kirsch and recent Come Date With Me Canada bachelorette Gail McInnes, hiked up three flights of stairs to take in the exhibit. To those who hiked in heels, we salute you.

Last night, Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum opened its latest exhibit, a retrospective of Parisian shoe designer Roger Vivier, with a glittering fête complete with champagne flutes and many a pilgrim buckle. The exhibit follows the designer’s career from his couture-style creations for Christian Dior in the 1950s to his legendary pilgrim-buckle flats made famous by the likes of Catherine Deneuve in the swinging ‘60s and beyond. Italian-born designer Bruno Frisoni, who helms the label in the present day, was there to toast to the exhibit, alongside our editor-in-chief Bernadette Morra (donning—what else?—pilgrim-buckled silver flats), Alexandra Weston, Jeanne Beker, Marilyn Denis and the museum’s grand dame, Sonja Bata, whose star shone brighter than ever with her lively opening remarks.

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I love soaking up my city’s cultural scene-especially when it’s free! While searching for local library hours, I discovered that my library card gives me access to not only books and back issues, but museums, galleries and historic sites too. A Sun Life Financial Museum and Arts Pass (borrowed from branches across Toronto, torontopubliclibrary.ca) admits […]

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Like a shoe paparazzo, Toronto’s beloved Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil captures some of the world’s most beautiful heels in action. Zillions of women devotedly visit the site to catch glimpses of the worldly lives these shoes lead. If you are a footwear cyber-gawker you’ve probably noticed a new breed of heels has been on the streets over the last few years. Remember the gun heels by Chanel? The tea cup and Baroque heels from Miu Miu or the Balenciaga Sportiletto? Not only are the silhouettes outrageously sculptural, the new shoes have also reached obscene heights–last fall, Christian Louboutin told The Wall Street Journal that he was planning on releasing an 8-inch platform this year.