19 January 2021

Starting a time travel with the keyword 'shoes' at the Wien Museum Online Collection

In mid-November 2020, the Online Collection of Wien Museum was launched. It's an extensive database of currently 50862 records with 81720 images (numbers fast checked today at sammlung.wienmuseum.at) of photographs over graphics to fashion items such as shoes. Last mentioned received now an own article at the museum's digital magazine at magazin.wienmuseum.at/historische-fussbekleidung where Regina Karner, Director of the Fashion Collection, and textile restorer Andrea Schmidt provide via video insights into the collection of around 2000 pairs of shoes with strong focus on the 19th century with artefacts like the boots on view on this page. In the video, Regina Karner gives a glimpse of the stories which are hidden in the museum's archive such as that the boots were once worn by Helene Vetsera, mother of Mary Vetsera who became tragically famous. Mother and daughter are representatives of a more glamorous fashion style of the Viennese aristocracy of the 1870/80ies.

At the end of the article with embedded video, Wien Museum publishes the direct link to the Online Collection, keyword 'Schuhe' (shoes) with the note that more than 1300 results will be delivered by the database. The search can be processed in Deutsch (German) or English and further filtered by several criteria like 'Date' (years) or 'Artist/Producer' where a selection of names of shoe owners, artists like photographers as well as names of brands, shoemakers support the search. As the database can't be compared with a curated exhibition, the information about single pieces is relatively pure respectively reduced to archival necessities. In the case of the Vetsera boots, the database entry references as literature the exhibition catalogue 'Experiment Metropole 1873: Wien und die Weltausstellung' from 2014.

Among the artists listed at the search tips, Fashion.at found the name of photographer Robert Haas, whose work and life was exhibited in 2016, 2017 at Wien Museum. At the database, pictures from 1940 show shoe related images from California of the Austrian who was expelled from his country and moved to the US.

Image: Unbekannt, 1 Paar Stiefeletten, 1875–1880, Sammlung Wien Museum, CC BY 3.0 AT, Foto: Christin Losta (https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/668591/).