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| Valerie Steele in the main room. |
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This is a terribly serious interview but it didn’t feel like it at the time. Dr. Valerie Steele, author, historian and Director and Chief Curator of the Fashion Institute of Technology, was smoking and drinking Sancerre when I arrived (it was 11 am but, as she put it ‘It must be five o’clock somewhere.’) I had some too, which gave me the thrill of the mild naughtiness of drinking early in the day. She’s got this really dirty, smoky laugh, sadly impossible to convey in print. She told me she was high school dropout and even though she’s now garlanded with Yale degrees and a prestigious title, she’s no goody-goody. I bet she was rebellious, quietly or otherwise. ‘A lot of people think that fashion people are like the skinny rich girls from high school but as many friends of mine in fashion have pointed out, in fact there are more people in fashion who were the geeky outsiders who were shunned at high school and who have managed to find, or make a place for themselves in fashion,’ she said. Her greatest love is curating the shows at FIT but of course her day is largely spent dealing with administration and funding and the other boring things that make the world go around. Her latest FIT show is Gothic: Dark Glamour and runs until February 21st.
So I have to start out by saying that I was worried about what to wear today! [She laughs] But then I decided to wear ‘honest’ clothes, ones that were not going to portray something that I am not. [For the record, and since this interview is about the language of clothes, I wore black pants, an Indian printed silk top and sandals, an outfit that JH informed Valerie was further evidence of my continuing lack of style. He himself wore jeans and a vaguely grubby yellow polo shirt and Valerie wore black pants, expensive-looking flats – I forgot to ask by whom – and a truly wonderful top by Jun Takahashi of Undercover that at first glance looked to be a flower-print but on closer inspection was actually a pattern of dripping vampire fangs.]
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| A wire-mesh sculpture by Elise Siegel. She made it as a response to an article she read in which a plastic surgeon claimed he could ‘correct women with defective breasts’. |
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Well, anyway, with all the messages that we send out via our clothes, this must really be the source of what you, as a fashion historian, are interested in.
Clothes are obviously really closely tied to our personal identity, probably more than other objects that we have. And their meaning is very elusive. It is constantly re-defined, and that makes it interesting but I think it also makes it in some ways complicated and people are rather nervous about it. I remember one class [at college] that I took and the professor said: ‘How would you interpret the clothes that I’m wearing?’ It was fun and amusing but he told me that in later years when he was trying to do this, asking them to interpret their classmates’ clothes, it got quite tearful.
Yes, it’s like you’re more naked with your clothes on than you are with them off.
Exactly!
What fascinates me is how women are arbiters of other women’s clothes. Their opinions are far more important than male opinion. I was interested to read in your book ‘The Corset: A Cultural History’, that that imprisoning garment was something that women championed, not men.
Well women were corseted for 400 years. But you think of Victorian women, you know, there were layers of meaning. If you wore a corset it was normal, most women wore a corset and it meant that you were respectable, you weren’t loose, you were literally strait-laced. But also you were enhancing your female sexual beauty, you looked slimmer, curvier and younger in your corset. It was an item of luxury lingerie, or it could be, so it had all sorts of connotations there. And it was the symbol, originally, of aristocratic standing even though it had passed down to the working class by that point. And different women would interpret it differently. Some would find it an attack on their body and they would want to take it off, but their mothers and governesses and grandmothers would say they had to wear it. Others were very defensive of male doctors who said, ‘Stop wearing corsets, it’s not healthy.’ They would say: ‘Butt out. This is something that we women will decide. It’s not up to you.’
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Above: The main room is used as both a living and a sleeping space. The ornate beds are from Bali.
Right: This delicate sofa comes from Kochin in south India. |
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| An Qing dynasty mirror. |
1930's photographs by Madame Yvonde. |
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Above: One of two antique beds bought in Bali when Valerie and her husband were on a sabbatical ‘a long time ago’. They were out biking and she said ‘Stop the bike. I want to buy that.’ It cost $600.
Left: A Japanese tansu (chest). The Nepalese dancing statuette is of Apsara, the heavenly nymph and the Ganesh statue is from India. |
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Do you think older women, and I’m thinking of magazine editors, still in a way dictate what young women should wear?
There are different types of gatekeepers. Fashion designers are one. But as Christian Dior once said, ‘The designers propose but the ladies dispose.’ But before they choose, of course, there are these different gatekeepers like the fashion editors who begin to select things and interpret them. A lot of the prescriptive literature in fashion journalism began to disintegrate by the late 60s and early 70s and fashion editors stopped being so bossy. So now they do more of the ‘proposing’. The empire of fashion has completely broken up into different style tribes – a million different looks going on.
This message sending again. I sometimes wonder if we were all put into burkas, we’d be lost.
What is interesting now is that they’re not sending a clear message that everybody picks up on. They might be sending one only to someone who can pick it up … almost like a secret handshake. |
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| The small velvet sofa in the living space is Victorian and the Empire sofa dates from 1810, possibly from the Caribbean. |
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| Two French paintings dating from the early 19th century. |
Valerie’s favorite hats, bought in France – they’re not for show, she wears them. |
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| The lamp, flanking the photograph of Valerie’s grandmother, is a thrift store find. |
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When we talked about corsets, it reminded me that propriety was once important, but now it seems vulgarity is the thing. It couldn’t be more different.
Oh yes, it couldn’t be more different, absolutely. I have to give a talk next year on modern fashion and I have to try and explain why there are no more Jackie Kennedys and Audrey Hepburns. It’s the Paris Hiltons who rule the world. It’s a whole different sense of what it means to be a celebrity. It’s not top down, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
And aiming for ever-younger consumers.
Well, the problem with being an historian is that you start seeing that things aren’t new that way. I’m still jet-lagged from coming back from Japan and I was reading in the middle of the night this book on 14th century Italy and of course all the young men, the teenage boys, were the real trendsetters. I think fashion was never just a grown-up domain. This book describes how an eight-year old child had one hair ornament, the cost of which would have supported a family for three months.
Is that just dressing-up rather than fashion?
From my point of view, fashion is any form of fashioning the body itself. I don’t draw a hard and fast line between clothing and fashion. |
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Above: The desk clutter of two writers.
Left: A Qing ginger jar sits upon a lacquered Japanese chest. |
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| A chest from the Qing dynasty. |
Balinese palace doors open to the bathroom. |
Right: The beds were sent in pieces from Indonesia and reassembled (by Valerie and her husband) in New York.
Below: Ornaments from Indonesia.
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| A 16th century signed silk scroll from China. |
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| Balinese palace doors have been fitted into the walls and open on to a closet (pictured) and to the bathroom. |
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Is there is difference between fetishizing fashion and clothes and celebrating these things?
Well, to some extent fetishizing is the norm for men. All men to some extent fetishize types of bodies and body parts. We’ve all known some men who like big breasts and all their girlfriends have big breasts and it’s just another step towards not being able to get it up unless you’re with a woman with big breasts. It’s the same with clothing items, like high heels. So that kind of sexual fetish seems to be typical of men. With women it’s less obviously sexualized. There’s something else going on with women when there is a great focus on body and clothes. But I think it’s too easy to see women as victims of society.
They can see it as something celebratory, perhaps?
Absolutely. I think in the 70s a lot of feminists just saw fashion as oppressive, and then more recently, more and more women have said that it can be but it can also be intensely pleasurable, creative and artistic.
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Above: A ceramic sculpture made by Valerie’s (now grown) son Stephen, when he was six years old.
Right: Another ceramic sculpture made by Valerie’s son, Stephen, when he was little. |
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| A buffalo incense burner from Japan. |
A Chinese roof ornament. |
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We can be embarrassed about the supposed superficiality of it. I just saw something on TV, introduced by Diane Sawyer, and she said something like ‘Oh we all know it’s superficial, but we can’t help but notice’ to introduce a segment on the clothes that Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain wear.
You see I don’t think that’s superficial at all. It’s very interesting the hostility to fashion, that it’s trivial and frivolous. I think it has a lot to do with male-dominated society, attacking fashion as something associated with women, although for most of history, men were by far and away the more fashionable set. But there was a reason for it. It had to do with status.
Is that idea of superficiality a Western thing?
You see it elsewhere, particularly in the modern world … you have the Judeo-Christian-Islamic prejudice against fashion because of its connection with the body and sexuality. And you have the utilitarian Socialist prejudice against fashion, that it’s elitist and it’s divisive. You have a whole series of rationales why fashion is not a good thing. |
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| Views of the dining area and kitchen (below). The dining furniture in the kitchen belonged to Valerie’s grandmother and dates from the 1840s. The toys and masks are mostly from Bali. The apartment, a stone’s throw from FIT, is basically two large rooms that have several functions. |
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| Looking from the library towards the kitchen. |
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Above: Valerie’s desk.
Left: Family photos – Valerie’s father holding her son, Stephen, when he was a baby. |
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| The 1930s chair in the corner of came from Valerie’s husband, writer and Chinese scholar, John S. Major’s childhood home. |
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Above: Valerie's reading chair accompanied by her latest read, Gilding the Market.
Left: This throw was a gift from Valerie’s sister. |
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| Malinowski – Valerie’s first degree from Dartmouth (‘the only place that would have me’) was in anthropology. |
An knitted side chair in the library. |
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Well it’s precisely because it is saying these things about ourselves, things that in some way can’t be governed.
It is deeply individualistic so any sort of philosophy that emphasizes order and morality in society will find fashion problematic. For that very reason, we have to remind ourselves that that is one of the good things about fashion, that it has that rebellious and anarchic, artistic quotient.
So what do you do when you covet clothes?
Once in a while there will be a dilemma, if there’s only one left: Do I buy this for me, or do I buy this for the museum? But if I worked in an art museum, I don’t think I would say ‘Why can’t I own all these paintings myself?’ But it was great epiphany to discover that I could actually do this for a living!
— Lesley Hauge; photographs by Jeffrey Hirsch |
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