Valerie Steele has been the subject of countless media interviews and feature articles, most of which repeat her career highlights, as follows:
*Director and chief curator at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has personally overseen some 25 exhibits since 1997,
*Author of twenty-odd books, many of which memorialize her museum exhibits (most recently, Bloomsbury released the hardcover Paris: Capital of Fashion to coincide with the eponymous exhibit at the Museum at FIT), and
*Founder in 1997 of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, the first peer-reviewed, scholarly journal focused on fashion studies.
The Washington Post described Steele as "one of fashion's brainiest women." Every year since 2014, she has appeared in The Business of Fashion's annual list of top industry influencers. When the Kyoto Costume Institute needed, as Steele puts it, "a well-known foreigner" to raise the profile of the museum's collection, she got the call. But few scholars, no matter how brainy or well-known within their field, appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as Steele did. The vast majority of Steele's fellow Yale Ph.D. graduates do not receive requests from The New York Times to visit their homes or tag along on a typical Sunday. Steele has bubbled up from the world of fashion scholarship to the world of fashion to the world at large, to the extent that one of her contemporaries greeted her with apparent sarcasm as "the ubiquitous Valerie Steele."
So, why has Steele in particular transcended the ivory tower into mainstream culture? None of the countless media interviews or feature articles tell us that. But we can find the answer in the conversation that Steele and I had last year, when we talked about the comparative roles of fashion and art.
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The Wrong Question
Joe Jarvis
Valerie Steele
J. Jarvis
V. Steele
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J. Jarvis
V. Steele
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J. Jarvis
V. Steele
J. Jarvis
V. Steele
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What Does Fashion Do?
J. Jarvis
V. Steele
J. Jarvis
V. Steele
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J. Jarvis
V. Steele
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Outro: The Freud of Fashion
Style emerges with the edit, not with addition. Whereas the clotheshorse haphazardly piles clothing onto the body, the stylish individual pares down and carefully teases out subtle tension points. The same is true for all arts, including writing. Valerie Steele knows this. She understands that simple language honors complex thinking. A great many academics, apparently lacking confidence in their arguments, pervert language against its nature; they use it to conceal rather than clarify. The reader must search for missing subjects and objects in the abandoned wells of 75-word sentences. When I recently read Steele's introductory essay in Paris: Capital of Fashion, I diagrammed her concepts in my notebook to better track her thinking. I did not, thankfully, have to diagram her grammar to understand what she thought in the first place. Oprah's audience immediately understood what Steele was saying. The New York Times and Washington Post reporters didn't need a secondary source to translate Steele's quotes. When Suzy Menkes, writing for the Times, called Steele "the Freud of fashion," Menkes referred to Steele's “quick mind," which was "forever analyzing the meaning of clothes, with a penchant for subcultures and for outfits from the edge of society." Steele has made a career of traveling back from the edge of society with concise reports of her adventures. Why isn't fashion art? She can explain the answer to a fashion enthusiast like me, or to a room full of fashion-studies experts in a Viennese museum, with equal ease.
That's how she became the ivory tower's ambassador to the public.
Steele hopes to produce an exhibit on fashion and psychoanalysis within the next two years. Psychoanalytic scholarship is doubly obscured: first by its own shadowy, speculative, and occulted nature (how can we consciously grasp the unconscious?), and second by the academese of its scholars. Imagine if Steele can return from this exploration―not to the edge of society this time, but to the edge of the the human mind―with answers. She has already established her legacy within academia. If she can demonstrate the influence of our internal, unseen psyches on how we communicate our perceived identities outwardly and visibly via dress, Steele might well extend her legacy beyond the narrow field of fashion studies into the commons of public thought.
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Postscript: "Paris: Capital of Fashion"
When I met Steele, she was preparing an exhibit titled, "Paris: Capital of Fashion," which ran until January 2020. To accompany the exhibit, Bloomsbury released an eponymous hardcover volume. After finishing our conversation about fashion and art, Steele and I discussed the exhibition, which the book memorializes via seven essays and dozens of beautiful photographs.
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