Sonja Bata, Whose Museum of Shoes Tells a Story, Dies at 91

Shoes function first as barriers between our bodies and the elements. We slip into and out of them as we do clothes, for protection and comfort, in adherence to social norms, but also to show our discernment.

For some, shoes are objects of fascination, collectibles worthy of walk-in closets and hours spent waiting in line to acquire.

Others see them as architecture, feats of engineering that we stand atop, connecting us to the world.

For Sonja Bata, shoes were all of the above and more.

Two weeks before her death, on Feb. 20 at the age of 91, Bata added one last pair of 18th-century heels to her collection of more than 13,000 shoes — a trove, spanning 4,500 years of history, that is on permanent display at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

It also chronicles a personal history — of a life spent traveling the world with her husband, Thomas Bata, who led his family’s Czech shoe manufacturing and retail business, the Bata Shoe Co., onto an international stage.

“She very much wanted to be a partner in the business, as well as in the marriage,” said Sheila Knox, acting director of operations at the Bata Shoe Museum.

The museum opened on May 6, 1995, on Bloor Street in downtown Toronto, a commercial thoroughfare lined with boutiques and restaurants. Sonja Bata had spent 15 years searching for a permanent home for her collection, which had outgrown her basement.

In the interim, her library of shoes moved from her home to the Bata Ltd. headquarters in Toronto, then, in 1992, to a temporary viewing space at the Colonnade, a retail and real estate complex a few blocks from the limestone building where it can be seen today.

On opening day, the collection comprised more than 10,000 shoes, from moccasins to Manolo Blahniks, and it has added 3,000 more, including Shaquille O’Neal’s size-22 sneakers and Elton John’s platform boots, monogrammed with his initials.

Bata was born Sonja Ingrid Wettstein on Nov. 8, 1926, in Zurich to the former Cleopatra Sutter and George Wettstein. Her father was from a line of distinguished lawyers with international clients. Her mother was known as a perfectionist homemaker who frequently entertained international guests. By the time Sonja was born, her father was blind, and from a young age she would read letters and legal documents to him.

Sonja eschewed the family profession to pursue a career in design, though her time in school was short-lived. She was only a semester into her architecture program at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich when she became acquainted with Thomas Bata, the heir to the Bata Shoe Co., during a ski weekend in St. Moritz.

Sonja and Thomas had actually met as children — Wettstein was the company’s lawyer — but had remembered little of each other as they grew up. A romance blossomed, and on a plane that Bata, an amateur pilot, was flying from Basel to Zurich, she received a sky-high proposal to marry him. They wed in 1946.

As their daughter, Christine Schmidt, said, the engagement was “a foreshadowing of many, many years spent on planes.”

The company’s operations had moved from Zlín, in eastern Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), to Southern Ontario in 1938 as the rumblings of imminent war in Europe grew louder.

After they married, Sonja Bata, long accustomed to the sophistication and convenience of Zurich, moved with her husband to the village of Frankford, near Lake Ontario midway between Toronto and Ottawa. Just south of their home, Thomas Bata had developed 1,600 acres into a planned community called Batawa, a hybridization of the shoe manufacturer’s name and the Canadian capital.

“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her at 19 to leave everything she had known and find herself in the middle of this small Ontario village in a small cottage,” Schmidt, a director of the Bata company’s operating board and vice chairwoman of the Bata Shoe Museum, said.

The couple spent much of their time traveling for business, to Africa, Asia and South America. The trips gave Sonja Bata opportunities to express her love of architecture by commissioning factories and retail locations as a business partner with no formal title.

“She never wanted a title in the Bata shoe organization, because she felt that she could do much more if she were on a project basis,” Schmidt said. “It was difficult in those days for a woman, especially the boss’s wife, to be given a title that she felt might be an empty title.”

The time spent abroad also bolstered her growing shoe collection, which in the course of a few decades had grown to 1,500 pairs. There were towering chopines from the Italian Renaissance and 3-inch-long women’s shoes from China.

In 1979, after three decades of touring the world, Bata asked an ethnologist friend in Toronto, Alika Webber, to examine her collection, which also includes clothes, shoemaking tools and other artifacts. Webber noted that the items, many of which were handmade, reflected methods of shoe production that were in danger of being forgotten; she deemed them artifacts worthy of a museum.

Later that year, Bata established the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation, which funded research projects and housed her collection until the museum in Toronto opened its doors in 1995. Bata had commissioned the architect Raymond Moriyama to design the building, a modern interpretation of a shoe box clad in limestone tiles.

Bata had a profound interest in the history of indigenous peoples, fueled by her far-flung travels, and dedicated funds to preserving their shoemaking processes. Through the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation, she supported footwear research in the Arctic and throughout Europe and Asia, which yielded exhibitions of furry Inuit boots and books on how the making of traditional Siberian garments reflects religious beliefs.

Perhaps unintentionally, Bata became the face of the company in Canada, in part through her involvement with Girl Guides, World Wildlife Fund Canada, the National Design Council and other organizations.

Her husband died in 2008. Besides Schmidt, who confirmed the death, Bata is survived by two other daughters, Monica Pignal and Rosemarie Bata; a son, Thomas; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. She lived in Toronto and died at Toronto Western Hospital.

Bata shut down its operations in Batawa in 2000, after attempts to compete with the low cost of labor in Asia became unsustainable. After her husband died, Bata commissioned the renovation of the old Bata factory into a sustainable, affordable housing complex. It is set to open in 2019.

But her crowning achievement was the Bata Shoe Museum. While it bears her husband’s family name, it is hardly an ode to the company’s designs.

“There are fewer than 10 Bata shoes in our collection,” Knox said. “This was never intended to be a corporate museum or an archive of the Bata Company. It was always intended to tell a story of humans and human history through footwear.”