The Bata Shoe Museum’s Latest Exhibition is a Love Letter to Cowboy Boots

“I have yet to run out of questions I can ask about footwear,” says Elizabeth Semmelhack, the director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum as she reflects on the museum’s 30th anniversary. Semmelhack has worked at the Bata Shoe Museum for 25 of those years, staging exhibitions dedicated to everything from the power-dressing and consumerism of the ’80s to a retrospective on Manolo Blahnik.

For its anniversary exhibition, Semmelhack turned to cowboy boots. Called “Rough and Ready: A History of the Cowboy Boot,” it tells the story of how the practical work boot has been transformed into a bona fide fashion statement thanks to countless interpretations and evolutions at the hands of celebrities (the exhibition overlaps rather nicely with Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour) and designers—including Pharrell Williams, who released a take on the boot as part of Louis Vuitton men’s fall/winter 2024 runway.

The exhibition tracks the history of the boot chronologically, and is divided into six sections. It starts with “Real” which, as the name suggests, tracks the earliest examples of functional cowboy boots and ends with “Reclaimed,” which spotlights the ways in which the cowboy boot’s original history is being challenged and rewritten. “A lot of people don’t realise that 25 percent of American cowboys were black. And at least another 10 percent were Indigenous,” says Semmelhack.

Today, cowboy boots are a genuine wardrobe staple for many—you can hardly go outside in a major metropolitan city without spotting half a dozen pairs worn with everything from slouchy denim to tailoring, once again proving their consistent relevance.

Here, Semmelhack gets into the history of the cowboy boot, some of the exhibition’s highlights and why she’s still so fascinated by footwear.

Rough and Ready: A History of the Cowboy Boot is on now. Get your tickets here.

First, why cowboy boots?

They are inherently very contradictory. While they are iconic, their history is very relatively new. The cowboy boot only came into existence in the second half of the 19th century. And the cowboy boots that the actual cowboys wore at the time, the real labourers, were just anything they could get their hands on. But by the end of the 19th century, by the 1890s, the heel—which was originally used to keep your foot in the stirrup—had grown quite significantly, and they began to use machine embroidery to add sturdiness to the shaft of the boot to the boot top.

But over time, all of a sudden, oh, embroidery, what can we do with it? And the myth of the cowboy is what starts to be manufactured through the Wild West shows and cinema. And that’s when the very decorative cowboy boots started to evolve. So in many ways, the decorative cowboy boot that we all know and love is a product of Hollywood and country music, and not so much what a real cowboy labourer or even a rancher would wear on a horse.

How did the style evolve over the decades?

Men in the 1890s started wearing pointy toe shoes. And guess what? You begin to see cowboy boots with slimmer toes because the cowboy boot is a part of the larger system. And so it is sensitive to changes in larger fashion while simultaneously, creating an iconic shape and look. When we see a cowboy boot, we know it’s a cowboy boot.

Then, in the ’30s and ’40s, you have crazy decorative boots. And then in the Post-War period during the rise of the idea of “True Grit,” you go back to plainer brown cowboy boots. And then by the ’80s, Tom Cruise appeared in Top Gun wearing retro cowboy boots.

And today there are so many people who are in the cowboy boot space and using cowboy boots in really interesting ways, from the rise of female cowboy boot makers to Orville Peck. We have his boots in the exhibition, and we also have Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton Riders from fall/winter 2024, where he was looking specifically at the impact of Black, Mexican and Indigenous fashion.

What are some of the other notable pairs of cowboy boots on display?

We have very early cowboy boots from the 1880s and 1890s. We have cowboy boots from all the heritage brands, we have Gene Autry’s boots. Gene Autry was the original singing cowboy who became famous in the 1930s and then very famous in the ’40s. We have Robert Redford’s Luccheses, which were part of that “True Grit” cowboy moment in the ’70s. We have a pair by Willie Lusk, who was one of the only, if not the only Black cowboy boot maker during segregation.

And of course we had to celebrate Canada, so we have boots worn in the Calgary Stampede in the 1920s and 1950s. And we have three pairs by Tony Benattar, an incredible Torontonian who created Liberty Boots.

What is it about cowboy boots that make them so relevant and appealing to this day?

For one thing, it’s a genderless form of footwear, which in itself is really interesting. And some cowboy boots are incredible works of art that can carry a narrative. And they also signify an idea of freedom, and so they can be worn in a way that can feel startling, or at the same time incredibly traditional.

Why is it so important to have a museum dedicated to shoes?

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot. I think that we’ve proven that footwear can be a really interesting—pardon in the pun—stepping point into much, much larger cultural issues. There are so many things that you can consider by starting with shoes. The stories about the maker, the wearers, where the materials came from, how it was distributed, why it was made at this specific time, what it symbolised. Even though we’ve been doing this for 30 years, people still walk away saying, “I had no idea you could learn that much by looking at a pair of shoes.”