Between the wardrobe and the sidewalk : an ethnography of shoes in everyday life

Zavratnik, Veronika (author), Kozorog, Miha (reviewer), Miller, Daniel (reviewer)

The monograph explores the relationship between people and the shoes they wear. Taking the seemingly habitual act of wearing shoes as its starting point, the book examines how people engage with footwear as part of broader dress­ing practices, including choosing, wearing, maintaining, and storing shoes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ljubljana, the monograph shows how footwear actively participates in everyday practices and experiences, high­lighting how notions of comfort, appropriateness, and situational demands are negotiated, and how shoe ward­robes are continuously reconfigured in relation to chang­ing social contexts, seasons, and life circumstances. Following the “life of shoes”, the monograph shows how footwear participates in shifts between situations and social roles, accumulates traces of use, and becomes tied to individual life trajectories. Through the accounts of interlocutors, it focuses on the situations in which such choices are made, showing how people navigate what to wear, when, and why.

• Language: English
• Keywords: shoes, material culture, clothing, clothing culture, clothing appearance
• Typology: 2.01 - Scientific Monograph
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Place of publishing: Ljubljana
• Publisher: Založba Univerze, = University of Ljubljana Press
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: 216 str.
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-182328
• ISBN: 978-961-297-812-9
• UDC: 391:685.341
• DOI: 10.4312/9789612978136
• COBISS.SI-ID: 272999427
• Publication date in RUL: 07.05.2026

Licences

• License: CC BY-SA 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Description: This Creative Commons license is very similar to the regular Attribution license, but requires the release of all derivative works under this same license.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: čevlji, oblačilna kultura, materialna kultura, noša, oblačilni videz

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P6-0187-2022
• Name: Etnološke raziskave kulturnih znanj, praks in oblik socialnosti