Dutch museum’s future looks bleak
31/07/2017
The city authorities in Waalwijk announced on July 13 that they would not continue to provide much-needed funding for the project. They said they still wanted Waalwijk, a town steeped in leather and shoe manufacturing heritage, to have a museum devoted to the industry but they said they did not want any funding to go to leather and footwear research and education institution SLEM.
SLEM, run by a well known figure in the industry, Nicoline van Enter, merged with the museum in 2015. Ms van Enter has said the authorities in Waalwijk approved of the merger at the time but that there is “a new political direction” that wants only to fund local initiatives rather than international ones such as the seminars and education programmes that her organisation runs. Waalwijk’s political leaders said they would withdraw funding, even if this meant SLEM going bankrupt.
At a court hearing in Breda on July 25, SLEM was officially declared bankrupt. On July 26, Ms van Enter relaunched her leather and footwear business under a new name, The Footwearists. While the museum’s fate is still undecided, it looks bleak because it is part of the corporate entity that has been declared bankrupt and museum staff have already been released.
The only shred of hope is that a court-appointed administrator, a local lawyer named Hans Alberts, may find a way of detaching the museum from SLEM’s bankruptcy.
See World Footwear September-October for more details.
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