A specialized museum of its own kind is the German Shoe Museum in the DLM with over 15,000 artefacts. Besides being a representation of international costume history over seven millennia, the collection allows a view into humankind’s intellectual und cultural history, earning this part of the DLM the additional name "World Shoe Museum": for example considering 3500 year-old sandals from Egyptian mummy burials, boot amulets and shoe-formed containers of 8th pre-Christian century Luristan, bead-embroidered moccasins from the Great Plains, chopines of the Italian Renaissance, Chinese gin lien, plateau sandals out of an Ottoman harem, the silk boots of Empress Sissi and Joschka Fischer’s trainers.
A new acquisition are the reconstructed mountain shoes of the Oetz Valley mummy: don’t think these are crude fur boots, bound primitively around the bare foot; they are finely sewn leather mules with a robust inner lining of fibre strings and filled with hay. Together with these "Ötzi", over 5000 years ago, already wore leggings like the North American Indians!
Several hundred images of shoemakers and their products form the bridge to the Shoe Museum’s gallery. Here one can see how intensely the human foot and its covering (or exposing) has inspired and still inspires the creativity of designers and artists. In this gallery terms such as "Fetishism" or "Sexual Symbolism" find their visual shape just as "Irony", "Experiment" or "Implication".

[ www.ledermuseum.de ]