When Valerie Steele was getting her Ph.D. in modern European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University, she upset the ivory tower by writing about fashion. Today, academics might give her more respect, considering her long list of accomplishments: becoming director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, co-authoring more than a dozen books, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, contributing to national magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, and serving as editor-in-chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. On April 14 at 1 p.m., Steele will give the Fashion Lab YARN lecture, hosted by Craft Alliance (craftalliance.org), at Washington University’s Steinberg Auditorium.
Were you into fashion growing up?
I wanted to be an actress when I was a child so that involved dressing up but I’m not sure it was fashion.
I heard that you dropped out of high school.
I did I’m a high school drop out. One of the few who ended up getting a PhD from Yale.
Why did you drop out?
I was bored. Don’t you remember high school was really boring?
So you got your GED?
I did but nobody cared about that because an 8-year-old could get a GED. The colleges that were interested were interested because I tested well and interviewed well.
You decided to start writing about fashion and culture when you were at Yale getting you PhD?
We had an assignment to talk about a couple of scholarly articles we read and I honestly don’t remember what the articles I found were but I remember a classmate looked at a feminist journal called Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and she found two articles about the Victorian corset one by Helene Roberts that said, “Oh the corset’s very, very dangerous and oppressive to women.” The other one by David Kunzle that said, “Oh no, the corset was very sexually liberating.” And it was just like a light bulb went on. I realized, “Oh my God, fashion is part of culture. I can do fashion history.” I went to the library and realized 99% of what was there was either fashion journalism or a kind of antiquarian costume studies. So there was tremendous room to do real scholarly fashion history as cultural history so that’s what I did.
And your Yale Professor were pretty against it?
They were mostly very negative about it. Even when they were interested in it personally they thought that it was a bad idea and in some respects they were right. I was regarded as unemployable by any normal history department because fashion history wasn’t taken seriously. I was an adjunct at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York University and Columbia and Cornell and Parsons [The School for Design], all over the place. And I kept writing books and then I started my journal [Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture] and then I got a job as curator at the museum here. That was the beginning of another approach to looking at fashion through objects—well I’d already been doing that actually from my dissertation on. In addition to doing research in written texts and in visual images I was also looking at lots and lots of actual clothes. You know measuring hundreds of corsets to see how much evidence there was for the fabled 16-inch waist—things like that.
Is there a lot of evidence?
Very very little. A tiny handful of people had waists that were less than 20 inches but the majority of corsets that you find in collections are anywhere between 22 inches and 35 inches if they’re laced completely closed. So you’ve got to probably add on a couple inches to whatever measurements are there for the laces because the laces were usually open an inch or two in the back.
Why do you think there was such a resistance to studying fashion in academia?
Well, the short and snippy answer would be have you seen how academics dress? [Laughs.] But more generally there’s a lot of prejudice against fashion in our society anyway. It’s seen as being trivial and frivolous and bourgeois and conformist and materialist and anti-feminist. I think it was really only when queer studies began to promote the idea that fashion could also be a form of self-expression as opposed to something that was just imposed on you and that you were oppressed by or resisted that there began to be an awareness that you could seize fashion as playing various roles in people’s lives.
Is there a period in American history when you think fashion was really pushed forward? Or a designer who changed fashion?
Well, Paris has been the capital of women’s fashion for about 400 years and London more the capital of men’s fashion. The Americans tended to resist that sometimes, particularly during WWII when Paris was occupied by the Nazis. Then there was a great movement to promote American designers you know sort of faute de mieux for lack of anything else. But then after the war the French came back again in spades with Christian Dior and the new look. I think really, although there were important pioneers like Claire McCardell in the ‘30s and ‘40s who did American style sportswear, I think it’s really not until the ‘70s when you have people like Halston and Calvin Klein that you begin to seen an acknowledgement internationally that there’s something that’s somewhat different going on in America—something more related to sportswear and perhaps more modern life.
Do you find now because of your journal and everything that people are respecting fashion more in the ivory tower?
I think so, yeah but it’s been a surprisingly long haul. I was in graduate school in the early ‘80s and a colleague of mine actually was in graduate school in the late ‘90s and she wanted to do her dissertation on fashion. She was in the sociology department, which, I mean, sociology pioneered people studying fashion and they still told her it wasn’t a good enough topic. But by chance right at that moment was when the first issue of Fashion Theory, my journal, came out. She went in waving a copy to her thesis advisor and womped it down on the desk and said, “Look there’s a scholarly journal on it, that proves it’s a valid topic for a dissertation.” Her professors backed down and let her do it and now she’s a very well published scholar. So that was ‘97 so yes it is more accepted. But it’s still been very slow and there are not very many places where, if you wanted to get a doctorate, you could get one in fashion.
Your first book was Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era Through the Jazz Age how do those things intersect?
Well we wear clothes on our bodies so the physical aspect of that means that issues of gender and sexuality I think are going to be especially prominent with fashion.
You once said that fashion is any form of fashioning the body. Does that include underwear and tattoos?
Absolutely, yeah. Underwear’s definitely part of fashion and tattoos are as well. When I did my journal Fashion Theory we made a point of including articles on tattooing and on piercing and on hairstyles as well as on styles of dress… and on menswear and on street fashion as well as so-called high fashion or elite women’s fashion.
Do you feel any pressure to dress really well cause you’re a curator at a fashion museum?
[Laughs.] I love fashion so I think it’s very pleasurable to go shopping and buy clothes and dress up. I wish had more money but what I have I spend on clothes so I think I look reasonably okay. I’m not exactly Daphne Guinness but I look reasonably okay.
Do you have a go-to outfit?
I have a favorite look, which is basically very narrow black pants and a black jacket and high heels. That would be a favorite look but whose pants or whose jacket would vary.
I heard that some of your favorite designers are Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto.
Well I don’t wear so much Yojhi anymore. I do like Rei—things from Comme des Garçons. At the moment I’m also really keen on Rick Owens and I like some of the things from Akris and I like, oh Haider Ackermann’s things are really interesting to me. And Gareth Pugh’s things are really interesting.
And what draws you to a particular designer?
I tend to like either designers who are kind of luxurious minimalists or designers who are sort of gothy fierce.
