Steele

Valerie. American fashion historian. In 1997, she became curator of the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum in New York where, having graduated from Yale in 1983, she had taught from 1985 until 1996. She has produced a series of books on the history of fashion, its social impact, erotic value, and iconic proliferation, including Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now (Yale University Press, 1997). For the Fashion Institute she has curated the exhibitions Claire McCardell and the American Look, Shoes: A Lexicon of Style and East Meets West. According to the Washington Post, she is “one of the most cerebral women on the fashion planet,” while the New York Times describes her as “a historian in stilettos.”