“85% of FIT’s students are female,” began celebrated fashion historian and curator Valerie Steele at October 13th’s panel discussion during CUNY’s Global Fashion Capital Conference.” “Yet if you go by famous names—the Armanis, the Marc Jacobs—more than half of them are men.”

Yahoo Style covered the panel I was on which centered on women’s roles in the industry, as well as how the media and an increasingly global economy are helping to shape new fashion capitals.

“The fifth fashion capital will be virtual.”–Valerie Steele #GFCC

— CUNY Fashion Studies (@CUNYFashion) October 13, 2015

The Business of Fashion‘s Kati Chitrakorn sat down with Valerie Steele for an interview about her role as Director and Chief Curator at The Museum at FIT.

“Putting on museum exhibitions is like making a film — it requires many people with different talents.”

Read the full interview on the BOF website.

• On August 30th, 1 Granary interviewed me about the state of fashion in museums and academia.

“Academics are more willing to accept that fashion is a valid topic to study. Fashion people are now more interested in hearing what intellectuals have to say. I think [it’s] become more relaxed.”

• On August 14th, Artnet News ran a piece asking “Why Are Fashion Blockbusters More Popular Than Art Exhibitions and What Can we do About It?” They spoke to three fashion curators, including myself, to get our perspectives.
• And on August 8th, CBS news featured a fun slideshow on their website called “Swimwear through the ages” to which I contributed a number of insights.

• Lastly, if you missed The New York Times piece where they came and visited me in my home, here is the link to the feature in the real estate section from January 2015.

Of course, this show relates to our last exhibition, A Queer History of Fashion. Like many artistic fields, dance has always been more bohemian and open to people of diverse identities and sexualities. However,  the connection between ballet and gay men (either as dancers or balletomanes) is relatively recent. It seems to go back only to Nijinsky’s era. Balletomanes then knew that Nijinsky was Diaghilev’s lover. There are no known nineteenth-century gay male dancers; men mostly went to the ballet then to see women’s legs.  Dance allows for viewing the nearly naked body. But that was part of its heterosexual appeal too. Now, there is a popular image that being gay involves being literate is all kinds of art forms.

Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes for Mark Morris’ Rite of Spring Photography by Stephanie Berger

If you’d like to read a review of the exhibition Dance & Fashion you’ll find a number of links here.

And you’ll find a video tour given by me on YouTube.

Many thanks to BOF for the honor!

Do you have a personal definition of fashion?

I would define fashion as the creation of the embodied identity. When you talk about fashion,you always have to think at the body. Never forget to link body, communication, art and decoration. The body is the center of fashion and it reflects the individual’s physical, personal and societal identity.

Read more of the interview here.

Renata: Among the extremely successful exhibitions you have curated is Love & War: The Weaponized Woman. What was your inspiration for the Weaponized Woman and what legacy do you want her to leave behind?

Valerie:The Weaponized Woman was a way of looking at both armor as well as clothing and lingerie as being a kind of chic armor that make women feel empowered. This was part of a longer analysis of fashion and not intended to oppressed women, but to be an experience that women engaged with on their own terms and that helped them create a changing embodied identity and that was what that show dealt with. At first nobody understood it. People kept saying “are you doing this show about uniforms?” But then one day Prada gave an interview and she said, you know “women have to be stronger and present themselves in stronger ways,” and I thought, “That’s really more what I’m talking about.”

Read the full interview here.

Harper’s Bazaar interviewed me about fashion academia, internships, my PhD thesis & many other topics.

Here’s the intro to the article and the full interview is here:

Academics like thinking of themselves as disembodied brains. Valerie Steele, however, was one of the first and remains—arguably—the foremost scholar to pay attention to bodies and how we dress them. Of course, she is the chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, founder and editor of the definitive peer-reviewed journal on fashion—Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture—and the author of a dozen books about fashion and its manifold meanings. We didn’t even have to consult our address book before calling upon Steele to illuminate the current condition of fashion education—where more courses are cropping up, but few ways exist to professionally apply an intellectual, critical interest in fashion. Here, Steele reveals the recent history of fashion scholarships and her role in making us take clothes seriously.

Link to article

Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes for Mark Morris’ Rite of Spring.  Photograph by Stephanie Berger.