Shoes – Tradition and Fashion

Homeland Museum Petrovac na Mlavi

Opening ceremony: Thursday, 3 May 2018 at 8 PM

Curator of the exhibition: Draginja Maskareli, senior curator at the Museum of Applied Art, Belgrade

Organized by the Homeland Museum Petrovac na Mlavi and the Museum of  Applied Art, Belgrade

The Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade houses a collection of women’s footwear dating from the first half of the 19^th century to the present day. The first footwear items entered the museum, following the establishment in 1951, with a collection of painter and engraver Ljuba Ivanović. The collection of 3,116 items, collected mainly during the period between the two world wars, witnesses the material culture in the Balkans from the Middle Ages to the early decades of the 20^th century.

The collection of Ljuba Ivanović contained only traditional types of footwear worn as part of the urban dress during the 19th century: slippers – terluci, mestve (a kind of indoor boots) and bath clogs. The first items of European fashion footwear were purchased for the museum’s collection in 1957: walking boots from 1914–1917 and evening satin shoes from c. 1927.

The largest part of the collection, about 100 pairs of women’s footwear, was shown in 2013 at the Museum exhibition Ah, Those Shoes!. The museum also participated as a partner in the international fashion heritage digitization project Europeana Fashion (2012–2015). Within this project, the collection of digitized women’s footwear of the Museum of Applied Art is available on the portal Europeana Fashion (www.europeanafashion.eu), along with over 700,000 fashion-related digital objects from the funds of leading European private and public museums, archives, and collections.

The exhibition Shoes – Tradition and Fashion showcases 25 items, mostly women’s footwear from the 19^th and early 20^th century from the collection of the Museum of Applied Art. The footwear was worn mostly in Serbia and the region, so it traces the process of transformation undergone by the dress of the Serbian bourgeois class during the 19^th century on its way from traditional Ottoman-influenced dress towards European fashion.