At your feet

Description

An eminently utilitarian object and an ornament subject to the vagaries of fashion, an ostensible marker of wealth as well as poverty, it is clear that footwear is linked to the very history of humanity. But what do shoes reveal about the person wearing them? It is from this questioning that the exhibition "À vos pieds" (Musée des Confluences, from 7 June 2016 to 30 April 2017) proposes to visitors to walk through the museum's collection of shoes, supplemented by a few loans, by tackling themes relating to the cultural anthropology and sociology of footwear: like clothing or food customs, it has its own codes from one civilisation to another, and the variety of footwear - as well as the customs and habits that govern their wearing - is absolutely phenomenal.