đď¸ Women Building Fashion Studies: Valerie Steele
Crafting an alternate universe around the interdisciplinary study of fashion, Valerie Steele decodes the secret of clothing as a window to our dreams, power struggles, and desires
On the eve of the Met Gala, weâre kicking off our Women Building series in style! Weâre reporting live from Modest Fashion Week, the 11th annual traveling runway show held in Paris for the first time. As we reflect on what this breakthrough moment means in a country with a long, complicated, and mostly antagonistic relationship with the headscarf, weâre eager to catch up with Valerie Steele, a pioneer of interdisciplinary fashion studies who approaches fashion as a fascinating window onto our dreams, desires, and anxieties. A visionary fashion historian and cultural studies scholar, Valerie also serves as Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Sources: Fashion Institute of Technology, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy (images)
A fashion icon in her own right, Valerie not only studies, but lives and breathes fashion. Sheâs the person who, after organizing an exhibit on the corset at the Museum at FIT, attended its opening night gala wearing a custom-fitted replica of an 1880 black leather corset. A passionate and engaging cultural commentator, Valerie has stylized a groundbreaking career by elevating the public conversation about fashion to new heights and changing the way we read the language of clothes. She has written over a dozen books on the history of fashion; founded a scholarly journal, Fashion Theory; and curated more than 25 exhibitions at FIT including Dress, Dreams & Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis; The Corset: Fashioning the Body; Paris: Capital of Fashion; Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color; and Gothic: Dark Glamour. Widely hailed as a leader in her field, Valerie appears on the Business of Fashionâs â500 Listâ and has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, PBSâ The Way We Wear, Forbes, The New York Times, and several podcasts.
As Yves St Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello recently observed, the magic of fashion is about creating desire. Valerieâs work is dedicated to exploring this magic and probing fashionâs dance with desire, fantasy, and the unconscious. Her latest book (and accompanying exhibit at FIT), Dress, Dreams, & Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis (2025), frames fashion through a psychoanalytic lens. Inspired by a 2015 conference on Fashion and Psychoanalysis in London, the book contributes to evolving debates in fashion studies while also engaging with the insights of a new generation of psychoanalysts like Anouchka Grose, Carolyn Mair, Didier Anzeu, and Bella Freud, Sigmundâs great-granddaughter and host of the popular podcast Fashion Neurosis.
On the heels of awards season, I ask Valerie about the collective desires, dreams, and anxieties reflected in contemporary red carpet looks like the ânaked dressâ. Cultural expectations about gender are on full display on the red carpet. Corsets are in high demand during awards season as they present an optimal, sexually evocative image of femininity. Women performers are encouraged to wear revealing, transparent, or ânakedâ gowns that amplify their vulnerability. Valerie notes that many of the ânaked dressesâ weâve seen on the red carpet over the past few years have incorporated corsets that are virtually sculpted onto womenâs bodies. A few seasons ago, Olivier Rousteing for Balmain designed a nude sand dress with a corset that made it look like wet sand clinging to the South African singer Tylaâs body. Meanwhile, men are conditioned to wield fashion as a shield on the red carpet, often by sporting dark suits that offer head-to-toe coverage and exude privacy and control. As these expectations for menâs looks on the red carpet remind us, fashion is sometimes armor that shields us, creating an illusion of invincibility.
Nicole Kidman recently explored the protective potentials of fashion in an interview with Vogue. Weâre reminded of them as we watch dramatic silhouettes soar down the runway at Paris Modest Fashion Week, approaching the sublime when they conceal more than they reveal. Camouflage, subterfuge, and disguise are top of mind for many fashionistas at this yearâs Met Gala, whose theme is Costume Art. Our favorite couture looks often seem to equip us with superpowers, strategically masking flaws, insecurities, vulnerabilities, and inner wounds. Valerie recalls how she prioritized fashion as a shield and oasis through her adolescent wardrobe choices. Drawn to vintage wear, Valerie approached clothing as a dramatic costume, theatrical experience, and integral part of counterculture. But she noticed that she kept gravitating toward a particular outfit in her wardrobe, a green corduroy jumper, because it made her look thinner. Through that attachment, she realized that fashion isnât just about embellishing the body. It also offers possibilities for hiding, reinventing, or protecting ourselves from being culturally âreadâ in ways that might damage or contradict our sense of identity and self-worth. Gender-fluid fashion embodies the notion of clothing as a safe space, highlighting beyond-the-binary looks to deflect the pain of rigid gender norms and misgendering.
Sources: H2H footage, BBC, Vanity Fair (images)
Evolving digital technologies are testing clothingâs capacity to protect us, particularly by blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Earlier this year, Grok AI unleashed a flood of non-consensual, user-generated deepfakes depicting women in see-through bikinis. But our devices not only expose us to abuse. As Valerie observes, screens have also emerged as the new mirror in the post-digital age, pressuring us to look a certain way. Our transition to a primarily screen-based existence during the global pandemic spotlighted how women are especially expected to present a curated image on Zoom or within the visual field. Filtering features and apps on Zoom and social media have intensified the effects of toxic beauty culture, triggering mental health struggles like Snapchat Dysmorphia that drive patients to extreme cosmetic surgery on a quest to emulate their flawless selfies in real life.
If fashion serves as a shield, it also invites fantasy - or complicated relationships to truth and opportunities to distance ourselves from pasts we would rather not claim. Coco Chanel was famously drawn to fashion as a realm of fiction, untruth, and disguise. Valerie describes how, after a traumatic childhood with an absentee father (Chanelâs father abandoned her at an early age and turned her over to an orphanage), Chanel pioneered an innovative look that allowed her to reinvent herself through androgynous styles. Chanel once told Salvador Dali that all of her designs sought to transform menswear into clothing that women could wear. Through her androgynous looks, Chanel styled herself into both a successful woman entrepreneur and the powerful father figure she never had. Chanelâs story reveals one of the secrets behind fashionâs enduring appeal. Because itâs worn on the body, clothing is intertwined with our sense of identity - so the act of embodying new styles may enable inner healing and catharsis.
As an embodied art form, fashion holds unique power to amplify or mask our innermost fears and insecurities, especially anxieties over how we look. Lacan maps these anxieties to the mirror stage, when infants delightedly ârecognizeâ their reflections in the mirror. Yet their delight flows from a fundamental fantasy or misrecognition - the gap between our sense of self and how we are seen by others. In her book, Valerie describes how Elsa Schiaparelli, like many famous designers, turned to fashion to soothe internal angst over her appearance. Raised by a mother who repeatedly told her that she was ugly, Schiaparelli once attempted to plant seeds in her ears, throat, and mouth âso that she would have a face covered with flowersâ. She tried to manage her body dysmorphia by creating beautiful clothing designs, like her famous âHall of Mirrorsâ evening dress, a nod to Lacanâs mirror phase that boldly challenged conventional feminine beauty ideals. Her work inspired subsequent designers and artists like Vivienne Westwood, Rei Kawakubo, and Orlan, the French performance artist who uses cosmetic surgery to disturb registers of beauty and ugliness and pursue alternative looks, including technological re-wirings of the human body that aspire to alterity and monstrosity rather than beauty ideals. While body modification practices are often understood by psychoanalysts as a mode of self-harm, Valerie reads them as identity statements and attempts to assert bodily control in the wake of trauma.
If, as van der Kolk observes, our bodies âkeep the scoreâ of trauma, a new wardrobe may temporarily blur the lines between victim and heroine. Opportunities for catharsis and redemption took center stage in Alexander McQueenâs Autumn/ Winter 2007 collection, âIn Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem 1692.â Through gothic evening wear, McQueen conjured his distant ancestor who had been prosecuted and killed during the Salem Witch Trials. His darkly elegant designs resurrected Howe as a saint rather than a martyr, uplifting her tragic fate in a powerful act of testimony, political commentary, and creative inspiration through fashionâs transcendent art of storytelling. Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin finds a similar counter-victim narrative at play in the couture of Thierry Mugler, whose otherworldly designs transmute women into hypersexualized fembots and mermaids. Though critics view his ensembles as a mode of fetishism or objectification, Nochlin says that women who wear Muglerâs clothes define themselves not as sex objects, but as sex subjects - agents rather than objects of desire. If femininity is a condition of masquerade, as Joan Riviere, Mary Ann Doane, and other feminist thinkers have suggested, then the work of great fashion designers, as Valerie sees it, is to expand the horizons of femininity by creating ânew costumesâ to disrupt binary categories of freedom and oppression and enact alchemical experiences of autopoiesis or self-fashioning.
Yet as we explore and expand our sense of identity, the costumes that we experiment with often highlight tensions between bodily exposure and concealment. While Freud understood children as exhibitionists who enjoy showing off their bodies, as adults weâre conditioned to cover ourselves with context-appropriate clothing to signal integrity, respect, honor, and class status or aspiration. Our outfits, as embodied choices we make about what to hide and what to reveal, often draw judgments from the outside world. Billie Eilish faced intense backlash in 2021 when she ditched her signature wardrobe of baggy clothes and appeared on the cover of British Vogue in a corset. Disillusioned fans felt Eilish had betrayed her ideals to conform to the hypersexualizing mandates of toxic beauty culture. They viewed body positivity and androgynous looks as integral to Eilishâs music, persona, authenticity, and brand. But Eilish framed her transformation in more complicated terms. She reflected on how she had used baggy clothing as a shield to deflect insecurities around her body and appearance, as Lorde similarly describes in her cameo on Charli XCXâs single âGirl (So Confusing)â. For Eilish, wearing a corset was not only an experiment in trying on a new costume, but an exercise in self-love, sexual empowerment and reinvention in the wake of violence.
Just as fashion embeds powerful creative and psychological statements, it also draws big revenues. Haute couture is a big hit in the museum circuit, headlining blockbuster exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Art Museum in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Palais Galliera in Paris. While viral exhibits appear to signal the âarrivalâ of fashion as an esteemed art form in its own right, Valerie, like many celebrated fashion designers and artists, is wary of conceiving of fashion as âArtâ with a capital A. While conventional art forms exist in a structured space of galleries and museums, fashion lives in a commercial fashion system with stores and buyers. Blockbuster shows remind us that fashion is a big business, signaling the power of savvy curators to parlay prestigious threads into six-figure ticket sales.
Cultural debate about what constitutes âhigh artâ or esteemed artistic creation underscores the power of gatekeeping in the art world. Marcel DuChamp spectacularly disrupted elitist views of artistic value and merit when he submitted a urinal, entitled âFountainâ, for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. Although DuChampâs piece was rejected by the board and never formally displayed in the exhibit, his subversive gesture fueled existential debate over the meaning of âartâ for generations to come. As Valerie points out, although we could say that almost anything is art after Warhol and DuChamp, this does not mean that everything is art. Many in the art world are heavily invested in this distinction, using financing as a gatekeeping tool to enforce perceived borders.
Gatekeeping is a prominent feature of academic life, as well. Despite her stellar record of accomplishments, Valerie has frequently hit up against resistance in academia, where some colleagues have critiqued her work, and fashion studies more broadly, as frivolous or lacking in substance. Resistance always âtells usâ something in psychoanalytic terms, and Valerie reads this academic resistance to her work as a symptom of how women, femininity, and the body are devalued in our culture. As a womenâs studies scholar, her insight resonates. Several years ago, I attended an Op Art exhibit at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco whose advertising banner fused the faces of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein into one image. Museumgoers laughed at the iconic juxtaposition, unable to conceive of Monroe and Einstein in the same visual frame. Popular culture encourages us to imagine brains and beauty as diametrically opposed, making it virtually impossible for us to perceive women, in particular, as both smart and beautiful. In the works of Western philosophers ranging from Aristotle to Rousseau and Nietzsche, women, femininity, and the body have long been construed as inferior to masculinity and the life of the mind, which are uniquely aligned with the possibility of transcendence. Within this framework, fashion is denigrated as bourgeois, conformist, childish, and superficial. Academic resistance to fashion translates to a lack of tenure-track positions for interdisciplinary fashion studies scholars, though their courses are in high demand. While feminist academics are more apt to embrace fashion as a site of intellectual inquiry, second wave feminists often view fashion and beauty as sources of womenâs oppression rather than empowerment. Relative to these dynamics, Valerieâs work has often been viewed as suspect. Many in the fashion industry are also wary of her work, construing her as an academic killjoy who aims to destroy shoppersâ passion for fashion.
If the study of fashion incites resistance, clothing has long featured as a symbol of resistance in countercultural movements. Iâm thinking of zoot suits during the 1940s riots in LA; blue jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, and flowing skirts in the 1960s hippie movement; safety pins in the 1970s punk scene in the UK; the hijab during 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests in Iran; and ICE OUT pins uplifting immigrantsâ rights in the contemporary US. Which fantasies inspire us to connect certain outfits to the ideal of freedom? I also wonder about the dangers of invoking fashion as a sign of oppression or liberation, especially in global protest movements.
For Valerie, all clothing is political since it relates to the individual and social body. Dress codes - like school uniforms or headscarf bans or mandates - spark protest because they are perceived to violate individual rights of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression. Valerie notes that protest movements often zoom in on specific body parts or features like hair. Womenâs hair is construed in many cultures as dangerously seductive and sensual, thus something that should be covered so that it does not arouse socially disruptive lust. Menâs hair is also implicitly perceived as sexual and disruptive, so that in many cultures men are expected to keep their hair very short. When American men started growing their hair long in the 1960s, they signaled a rejection of militaristic or âcrewcutâ masculinity. Similarly, blue jeans became an iconic item in the 1960s because they were seen as a working class garment that seemed to obliterate clear visual signs of social class and to blur ideas about sexuality, age, and gender.
The hijab is an especially charged symbol in social justice movements and international politics. It is often maligned as a symbol of âradical Islamâ or âwomenâs oppressionâ, especially in Western national security rhetoric, popular media portrayals, and feminist or Orientalist ârescueâ narratives. Modest fashion also comes under fire on digital platforms, where religious ideals of modesty and piety are perceived to clash with social media and fashion industry incentives to attract the gaze and arouse desire. For some audiences, fashion and religion are incompatible. While Muslim women who embrace modest fashion believe it affirms their faith, preserves their integrity, and allows them to control their visibility in the public sphere, modest fashion influencers on social media are routinely criticized for participating in the attention economy. Their modest chic is perceived to conflict with core Islamic principles of modesty, humility, and lowering the gaze.
For Valerie, the politics of fashion centers on issues of control and freedom of choice. While she supports women who oppose the mandatory hijab in Iran, she also supports those fighting to overturn the niqab ban in France. Valerie is also attentive to the shifting historical and cultural dynamics that inform our sartorial desires for freedom. Collective understandings of oppression and resistance are fluid and, as fashion trends like the Victorian corset, fluctuate over time.
Beyond oppression and resistance, the clothes we wear are also intimately tied to cultural narratives of shame. Valerie observes how all cultures have incorporated a sense that the naked body must be modified, whether with body paint, jewelry, or clothing. In the Bible, Adam and Eve experienced shame only after they ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and realized they were undressed. By that point, Valerie notes, they had internalized a moral belief that nakedness is immodest. We are especially conditioned to view womenâs naked bodies as a source of humiliation, particularly in public spaces and on digital platforms. Marilyn Monroe faced this stigma early in her career when her nude photos were released. Although nude images in the 1950s often damaged womenâs careers in Hollywood, Monroe challenged cultural taboos by framing her nudity not as a source of humiliation, but a means of income as a struggling artist. Almost a century after Freud assessed womenâs acts of knitting and weaving as attempts to cover the shame of âpenis envyâ or âinferior equipmentâ, Ahoo Daryaei stripped to her underwear on a college campus in Tehran to protest state violence and bad hijab shaming tactics. As I reflect on these colorful episodes in fashion history, I wonder how cultural shame narratives inform our wardrobe choices. What role does shame play in fashion today?
Shame is a potent emotion that can make us feel self-conscious, inferior, as if weâre under siege or being attacked from within. Marguerite Duras powerfully recalls her threadbare, hand-me-down dresses in The Lover, evoking them as a source of shame that marked her as lower-middle class rather than part of the French colonial elite in 1950s Vietnam. Some anthropologists associate shame with the skin, the bodily organ that directly exposes us to the outside world and judgment, and Valerieâs book explores ideas of the âskin-egoâ within fashion studies. But for de-colonial scholars like Frantz Fanon, shame seeps deep below the surface of our skin, informing our self-image and psyche, or inner cinema, and how we move through the world. Shame is most dangerous when it thrusts us into a state of internal colonization, impacting everything from the outfits we wear to the media we consume and the knowledge we pursue. But as Ahoo Daryaeiâs underwear protest reminds us, itâs possible to reverse shame, even if just for a moment. To heed her revolutionary call might mean to approach fashion, as the Met Gala promises to do, as an arsenal of costumes with infinite potential to transform and redefine power, identity, and control.
Watch our full conversation below!
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