I realized, “Oh my God, fashion is part of culture.

We had an assignment to talk about a couple of scholarly articles we read and I honestly don’t remember what the articles I found were but I remember a classmate looked at a feminist journal called Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and she found two articles about the Victorian corset one by Helene Roberts that said, “Oh the corset’s very, very dangerous and oppressive to women.” The other one by David Kunzle that said, “Oh no, the corset was very sexually liberating.” And it was just like a light bulb went on. You decided to start writing about fashion and culture when you were at Yale getting you PhD? The colleges that were interested were interested because I tested well and interviewed well. I did but nobody cared about that because an 8-year-old could get a GED. Don’t you remember high school was really boring? One of the few who ended up getting a PhD from Yale. I heard that you dropped out of high school. I wanted to be an actress when I was a child so that involved dressing up but I’m not sure it was fashion. On April 14 at 1 p.m., Steele will give the Fashion Lab YARN lecture, hosted by Craft Alliance ( ), at Washington University’s Steinberg Auditorium.

Today, academics might give her more respect, considering her long list of accomplishments: becoming director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, co-authoring more than a dozen books, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, contributing to national magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, and serving as editor-in-chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. in modern European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University, she upset the ivory tower by writing about fashion. When Valerie Steele was getting her Ph.D.

The corset valerie steele