Between the Wardrobe and the Sidewalk: An Ethnography of Shoes in Everyday Life

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.