Valerie Fahnestock Steele (born 1955) is an American fashion historian, curator, and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Steele has written more than eight books on the history of fashion, and can be regarded as one of the pioneers in the study of fashion. She was appointed director of the museum in 2003. [1]
As director and chief curator of the museum, Steele has curated more than 25 exhibitions over the past twenty years, including Gothic: Dark Glamour, Love & War: The Weaponized Woman, The Corset: Fashioning the Body, and Femme Fatale: Fashion in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. [2]
In addition Steele is the editor-in-chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture (Berg Publishers), an academic journal which she founded in 1997. She is the author of numerous books, including Gothic: Dark Glamour, The Corset: A Cultural History, Paris Fashion: Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now, and Women of Fashion: 20th-Century Designers.
She gives lectures frequently and has appeared on many television programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show . After she appeared on the PBS special, The Way We Wear, she was described in The Washington Post as one of "fashion's brainiest women". Often quoted in media, she was herself the subject of profiles in Forbes and The New York Times as well as being listed in the New York Daily News "Fashion's 50 Most Powerful". She has also appeared on various podcasts including Creative Conversations with Suzy Menkes, Nymphet Alumni, Dressed: The History of Fashion, and The Museum at FIT Fashion Culture Podcast. [3]
Gothic fashion is a clothing style worn by members of the goth subculture. A dark, sometimes morbid, fashion and style of dress, typical gothic fashion includes black dyed hair and black clothes. Both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner, dark nail polish and lipstick, and dramatic makeup. Styles are often borrowed from the Elizabethans and Victorians. BDSM imagery and paraphernalia are also common. Gothic fashion is sometimes confused with heavy metal fashion and emo fashion.
A corset is a support garment worn to hold and train the torso into the desired shape and posture. They are traditionally constructed out of fabric with boning made of whalebone or steel, a stiff panel in the front called a busk which holds the torso rigidly upright, and some form of lacing which allows the garment to be tightened. Corsets were an essential undergarment in European women's fashion from the 17th century to the early 20th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries they were commonly known as "stays" and had a more conical shape. This later evolved into the curvaceous 19th century form which is commonly associated with the corset today. By the beginning of the 20th century, shifting gender roles and the onsets of World War I and II led the corset to be largely discarded by mainstream fashion.
Tightlacing is the practice of wearing an increasingly tightly laced corset to achieve cosmetic modifications to the figure and posture or to experience the sensation of bodily restriction. The process originates in mid-19th century Europe and was highly controversial. At the peak of the prevalence of tightlacing, there was much public backlash both from medical doctors and dress reformers, and it was often ridiculed as vain by the general public. Due to a combination of evolving fashion trends, social change regarding the roles of women, and material shortages brought on by World War I and II, tightlacing, and corsets in general, fell out of favor entirely by the early 20th century.
The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is a public college under the State University of New York, in New York City. It focuses on art, business, design, mass communication, and technology connected to the fashion industry. It was founded in 1944.
The corset is a supportive undergarment for women, dating, in Europe, back several centuries, evolving as fashion trends have changed and being known, depending on era and geography, as a pair of bodies, stays and corsets. The appearance of the garment represented a change from people wearing clothes which fit their bodies to changing the shape of their bodies to support and fit their fashionable clothing.
A rivethead or rivet head is a person associated with the industrial dance music scene. In stark contrast to the original industrial culture, whose performers and heterogeneous audience were sometimes referred to as "industrialists", the rivethead scene is a coherent youth culture closely linked to a discernible fashion style. The scene emerged in the late 1980s on the basis of electro-industrial, EBM, and industrial rock music. The associated dress style draws on military fashion and punk aesthetics with hints of fetish wear, mainly inspired by the scene's musical protagonists.
Cybergoth is a subculture that derives from elements of goth, raver, rivethead and cyberpunk fashion. Cybergoth was particularly prevalent from the late 1990's, through the 2000's but has since declined dramatically.
A bodice is an article of clothing traditionally for women and girls, covering the torso from the neck to the waist. The term typically refers to a specific type of upper garment common in Europe during the 16th to the 18th century, or to the upper portion of a modern dress to distinguish it from the skirt and sleeves. The name bodice is etymologically an odd plural spelling of "body" and comes from an older garment called a pair of bodies.
Mainbocher is a fashion label founded by the American couturier Main Rousseau Bocher, also known as Mainbocher. Established in 1929, the house of Mainbocher successfully operated in Paris (1929–1939), and then in New York (1940–1971).
An hourglass corset is a garment that produces a silhouette resembling an hourglass shape characterized by wide hips, narrow waist, and wide bust.
Fashion in the period 1900–1909 in the Western world continued the severe, long and elegant lines of the late 1890s. Tall, stiff collars characterize the period, as do women's broad hats and full "Gibson Girl" hairstyles. A new, columnar silhouette introduced by the couturiers of Paris late in the decade signaled the approaching abandonment of the corset as an indispensable garment.
The 1910s in Western fashion encompasses styles from 1910 to 1919. Western fashion in this period carries influences from oriental and neoclassical inspirations as well as the subsequent effects of World War I. Over the decade, Women's fashion experienced a shift towards shorter hemlines and dropped waistlines in addition to the more practical garments necessitated by the war. In men's fashion, evening wear largely continued to adhere to previous conventions while trends in informal outerwear continued to evolve. During the period, shifts in fashion made way for styles associated with the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
Metal corsets are a type of historical corset or bodice made entirely out of metal, usually iron or steel. The metal corset was popularly claimed to have been introduced to France by Catherine de' Medici in the 16th century, although this is now considered a myth. The idea that such garments were worn for fashionable purposes is debatable, with fashion historians now regarding such claims sceptically. Many of the original metal bodices that have survived are now believed to have been intended for medical purposes as orthopaedic support garments and back braces. Such garments were described by the French army surgeon Ambroise Paré in the 16th century as a remedy for the "crookednesse of the Bodie."
The sack-back gown or robe à la française was a women's fashion of 18th century Europe. At the beginning of the century, the sack-back gown was a very informal style of dress. At its most informal, it was unfitted both front and back and called a sacque, contouche, or robe battante. By the 1770s the sack-back gown was second only to court dress in its formality. This style of gown had fabric at the back arranged in box pleats which fell loose from the shoulder to the floor with a slight train. In front, the gown was open, showing off a decorative stomacher and petticoat. It would have been worn with a wide square hoop or panniers under the petticoat. Scalloped ruffles often trimmed elbow-length sleeves, which were worn with separate frills called engageantes.
Fashion in the twenty years between 1775 and 1795 in Western culture became simpler and less elaborate. These changes were a result of emerging modern ideals of selfhood, the declining fashionability of highly elaborate Rococo styles, and the widespread embrace of the rationalistic or "classical" ideals of Enlightenment philosophes.
A strapless dress or top is a garment that stays put around the upper body without shoulder straps or other visible means of support. It is usually supported by an internal corset and/or brassiere, with the tightness of the bodice preventing the dress from slipping out of position.
Deborah Milner is a British fashion designer, active since the 1990s. Since 2000, she has focused on ecologically aware design, founding her ecological couture line, Ecoture, in 2005. In the early 2010s, she was head of the Alexander McQueen couture studio.
Marian Elizabeth Pritchard was a late 19th- and early 20th-century British fashion writer and journalist who predominantly wrote under her formal married names Mrs. Eric Pritchard and from 1918, Mrs. C. W. Forester. She is most famous as the author of the 1902 style manual The Cult of Chiffon, and has been described as "one of the first truly outspoken high-profile fashion journalists."
Pamela Golbin is a French curator, author and fashion historian. From 1993 to 2018 she was the chief curator of fashion and textile at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 2019 she became artistic director of the Jacquard artist's residency.
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