Images by Samantha Casolari

Dr. Valerie Steele has redefined “geek-chic.” Boasting a PHD from Yale, the current Director and Curator-in-Chief of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) favors an intellectual approach to style, rather than an editorial one. Walking into her office during a jam-packed New York Fashion Week, Steele plays up her academic persona with a tight blond ponytail and signature leopard-print Selma Optique cat-eye glasses. As she sits down at her desk, surrounded by walls crammed floor to ceiling with fashion theory and history books, she paints her face with a pale layer of makeup. She didn’t have time to do it before leaving her apartment, seeing as she was just about to open FIT’s current exhibition, Japan Fashion Now. But Steele is used to the pre-show rush. She has, after all, curated over 20 exhibitions over the past ten years. Furthermore, she’s authored books on everything from Gothic style to handbags to fetish fashion to the little black dress, as well as launching and taking on the role of Editor-in-Chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture in 1997. But don’t peg her for a dry, lofty brainiac. This is fashion we’re talking about, and Steele approaches each new project with the same schoolgirl (or perhaps, graduate-student) enthusiasm as the last. For Steele, fashion is not just an art, a product or a magazine spread, but rather a lens into the social psyche and cultural behaviors of the past, present and future. And in today’s fashion world, which is bursting with here today, who tomorrow bloggers, a never ending line-up of the next big things and an increasingly voracious give-it-to-me-now audience, this is both a rare and indispensable perspective.

Katharine Zarrella: What is your first memory of fashion?

Valerie Steele: My earliest memory is when I was about four years old, wearing smocks for art class.

Katharine: Did you always know that you wanted to work in fashion?

Valerie: No, I wanted to be an actress when I was young, which did have a fashion component because I remember dressing-up in costumes and so on.

Katharine: And in what, exactly, did you get your PHD at Yale?

Valerie: It’s in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. But all of my courses, with one exception, I turned into doing about fashion.

Katharine: How did you do that?

Valerie: Just being pigheaded.

Katharine: How many years have you been in the industry?

Valerie: Gosh, I got my doctorate at Yale in ’83, and in ’84 I was a post-doc fellow at the Smithsonian in the costume collection at the National Museum of American History. In ’85 I started to teach at F.I.T. in the graduate school and then, in ’97, I became the Chief Curator here…so my entire adult life.

Katharine: How would you describe your personal aesthetic?

Valerie: It’s fairly uniform. I mean this is Tao Kurihara. It’s a black trench coat but it’s made out of antique handkerchiefs. This is Junya Watanabe and then the shoes are Repetto. You know, the ballet company, but they make heels.

Katharine: Being a curator, do you feel that you curate your outfits in your day-to-day life?

Valerie: I think that everybody puts together a persona when they get dressed in the morning. I suppose if you’re in the fashion world, you’re more aware of that. Sometimes people react to me as though they think I’m the fashion police. Being in the fashion world, people think that that’s the first thing you look at. I have friends who say, “Oh, you’re giving me that ‘Fashion Police’ look.”

Katharine: So do you have any pet peeves, being the chief of the fashion police?

Valerie: Oh no, no, no! I try not to judge anybody!

Katharine: On a more serious note, what goes into curating these FIT shows?

Valerie: Well, I think to curate an exhibition is not just to use a bunch of pretty dresses and put them together. I’m not just thinking of a subject or a theme, rather I’m trying to get an idea across. So a show has to have a kind of thesis and then the objects are evidence, in a way, for that thesis. So the Gothic show that I did a couple of years ago… that was saying that Gothic style was an important influence on fashion, not just on sub-cultural Goth style but on high fashion as well. For the Japanese show, I’m trying to give people a 360 [degree perspective] on what contemporary Japanese fashion is like and compare that to the first Japanese fashion revolution in the 1980s.

Katharine: What roll do you feel these intellectual exhibitions play in today’s instantaneous fast-fashion, blogger-obsessed world?

Valerie: I think that the museum has become just another site for the display of fashion. When you walk down the street of New York, that’s a site of fashion. You can see all the great street style. When you go to see a show on the runway, that’s another site of fashion. When you go to a retail store and look at the way Simon Doonan has put the windows together, that’s another site. And the museum is yet another one, where maybe it’s slightly more abstracted or it takes you out of the trend aspect of fashion and makes you look at it from another angle. Sometimes it’s inspiring to designers. Certainly I’ve had lots of students and designers talk about how they were inspired by a particular show.

Katharine: Are there any exhibitions you’ve done that are especially near and dear to your heart?

Valerie: Well, Gothic Fashion (2008-2009), of course, is very near and dear to my heart. In retrospect, London Fashion (2001-2002) was also really important to me because we had everything from punk anti-fashion, Vivienne Westwood—we even started with Carnaby Street—and then had whole sections on [Alexander] McQueen and on [Hussein] Chalayan and so on.

Katharine: You’ve just opened the Japanese fashion show and you’re also working on a Japanese fashion book right now. What drew you to Japanese fashion?

Valerie: Well, I’ve always been personally interested in Japanese fashion because I think what, in the ’80s, designers like [Rei] Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons did was really radically shake up the world of fashion and present a new aesthetic, a new way of looking at the relationship between the body and clothes, a new way even of viewing fashion as quasi art. So that was interesting to me. And then when I worked on the Gothic show and I started to think in terms of Gothic Lolitas and Japanese street style, I started to wonder what else was happening in the Tokyo world. The ’80s were so influential with Kawakubo and Yohji [Yamamoto] and [Issey] Miyake. Then in the ’90s Japanese fashion seemed to disappear, but there was great Japanese street style and there was great Japanese contemporary art—and then Manga and Anime—so I just wanted to look at what’s happening now in this incredibly fashion-forward country

Katharine: Where does one draw the line between fashion and art? Or, rather, do you feel there is a line?

Valerie: Well it’s interesting you should say that because I’m working on a paper for the College Art Association and an article about fashion and art, so that’s what I’m thinking about a lot right now. I would say that the main charges that say that fashion is not art and is different than art are because it’s more commercial. It’s more of a part of daily life, whereas art seems to transcend it’s commodity status—although obviously there is a whole art business. But I think if you look at it in historical terms, fashion appears to be something that is, perhaps, in the process of being re-imagined as art, [in] the same way that photography and cinema and Jazz were before.

Katharine: What and whom should we be looking out for in the Spring 2011 collections?

Valerie: Well I think [Jospeh] Altuzarra’s becoming really interesting. I’m really excited about the work that he’s doing. I think that there are some others… Haider Ackermann is somebody who I think is also becoming more and more interesting. There are a lot of creative, talented people who are here designing. It’s just a question of who’s going to resonate with fashionable people at this moment.

Katharine: When you’re selecting these up-and-coming designers whom you’re pegging as “the ones to watch,” are there certain criteria that you look for or is it simply on a case-by-case basis?

Valerie: It’s hard to identify specific criteria. When you collect contemporary design, you’re trying to have an educated guess about who you think is going to be influential within the fashion world—not necessarily the most popular [designers] or who will sell the most or make the most money, but those who influence their colleagues in fashion and therefore will ultimately play a roll in advancing fashion.

Katharine: The fashion calendar is quite manic right now, with endless seasons and collections and the rise of fast fashion. What are your feelings on today’s warp-speed fashion schedule?

Valerie: Well, you know, a lot of it doesn’t involve radical changes. It’s more a question of bringing in new merchandise at a time when consumers want to buy it and I think ultimately Donna Karan’s probably right that there’s going to have to be a shakedown, and the timing of fashion shows and deliveries is going to have to be adjusted, because it’s crazy to show things three, six months before they’re in stores.

Katharine: So you’re a supporter of designers, like Rad Hourani, who have made their collections available immediately after the show?

Valerie: Well I think that that’s going to be hard for people to pull off, but I think there has to be some kind of adjustment.

Katharine: I have to ask your feelings on blogging. How do you think it’s aided or hindered fashion journalism and criticism?

Valerie: Well I think that it’s part of the impact of the Internet, which has changed retailing and everything else. Now we see it’s changing reportage. Some of it is sort of just like—as they say with computers—garbage in, garbage out. People may be telling you thoughts off the top of their heads and whether they’re journalists or just amateurs, it may or may not be interesting to listen to. But I think that a lot of bloggers are in fact surprisingly good and actually know a lot about the history of fashion and are quite astute.

Katharine: What are you working on next?

Valerie: I’m working with Daphne Guinness. I’m doing a show about Daphne’s style and her personal collection.

Katharine: Will the Isabella Blow pieces be included?

Valerie: We haven’t yet decided if we’re going to integrate those or if that will be a separate show.

Katharine: I was having a conversation with someone the other day about the ability to reach a wide range of people and, essentially, the possibility of changing the world through fashion. Do you think that’s a tangible goal?

Valerie: Well I think that nobody is outside of fashion. That’s the thing. What’s interesting about fashion is that it is so much part of quotidian life and it’s something that—one way or another—touches everybody. And I think that that’s one reason it hasn’t been taken seriously, but it’s also one of the great things about working in fashion; everybody ultimately has some kind of interest [in] or response to it.

Katharine: What do you ultimately hope to achieve as a fashion curator and academic? Or do you think that you’ve already achieved it?

Valerie: Well, I think that what I try and do is advance the knowledge of fashion and get people to realize that fashion is an important social and cultural phenomenon. That doesn’t mean that it’s not fun and it’s not sexy and it’s not immediate. I think that in the past, I fell between two schools. People in the academic world thought what I was doing was too fluffy and frivolous, and people in the fashion world thought I was being an egghead. But it’s like doing research on sex. Sex doesn’t stop being interesting and appealing to people just because you’re trying to analyze what’s going on.