Valerie Steele

Summary

Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has personally organised more than 25 exhibitions since 1997.

Biography

Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has personally organised more than 25 exhibitions since 1997, including “The Corset: Fashioning the Body”, “Gothic: Dark Glamour, A Queer History of Fashion”, “Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color”, and “Paris, Capital of Fashion.” She is also founder and editor in chief of “Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture”, the first peer-reviewed, scholarly journal in Fashion Studies.

As director, Dr. Steele seeks “to position The Museum at FIT in the forefront of fashion scholarship and exhibitions — to make this the world’s best fashion museum.” In addition to building the Museum’s collections and organising exhibits, she plans to develop related symposia and special events, which will share the Museum’s resources with a wider range of audiences.

The Museum at FIT attracts thousands of students, designers, and scholars from around the world who come to view exhibits or study the collections. The museum’s costume collection includes approximately 50,000 garments dating from the 18th century. The textile collection, with more than 30,000 textiles, dates from the 6th century to the present and illustrates a variety of techniques and traditions from around the world.

Steele combines serious scholarship and a Yale PhD with a rare ability to communicate with general audiences. She is author or co-author of more than two dozen books, including “Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Women of Fashion”, “Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power”, and “Fashion Designers A-Z: The Collection of The Museum at FIT”. Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

As author, curator, editor, and public intellectual, Valerie Steele has been instrumental in creating the modern field of fashion studies and in raising awareness of the cultural significance of fashion. She has appeared on many television programs, including ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ and ‘Undressed: The Story of Fashion’. Described in The Washington Post as one of fashions brainiest women and by Suzy Menkes as The Freud of Fashion, she is listed as one of ‘The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry’ in the Business of Fashion 500.

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References

• Valerie Steele BoF
• Valerie Steele FIT
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