UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FASHION · HISTORY
Valerie Steele
Also known as: VALERIE STEEL, Valerie Fahnestock Steele
American fashion historian, curator, and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
"How can you write about fetishism if you aren't into it?" asked the tight-laced dominatrix.
— from Fetish
Most acclaimed
Fetish
The concept of fetishism has recently assumed a growing importance in critical thinking about the cultural construction of sexuality. Yet until now no scholar with an in-depth knowledge of fashion history has studied the actual clothing fetishes themselves. Nor has there been a serious exploration of the historical relationship between fashion and fetishism, although erotic styles have changed significantly and "sexual chic" has become increasingly conspicuous. Marshalling a dazzling array of evidence from pornography, psychology, and history, as well as interviews with individuals involved in sexual fetishism, sadomasochism, and cross-dressing, Steele illuminates the complex relationship between appearance and identity. Based on years of research, her book Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power explains how a paradigm shift in attitudes toward sex and gender has given rise to the phenomenon of fetish fashion.
Fifty years of fashion
Valerie Steele begins by discussing the impact of the Second World War on the international fashion system, explaining, for example, how the success of Christian Dior's "New Look" was the result of sweeping social and economic changes that included a shift from the atelier to the global corporate conglomerate. In the 1950s, Steele argues, developments in the world of fashion were influenced by sexual politics and the anxieties associated with the Cold War: social conformity and gender stereotypes led to such phenomena as "wife dressing" and "the man in the gray flannel suit." Steele traces the fashion revolution of the 1960s, which smashed both social and sartorial rules as "swinging London" inaugurated its own new dictatorship of youth. She describes the rise of the women's movement and the hippies' anti-fashion sentiment, which ushered in a new freedom of choice in the 1970s, "the decade that taste forgot." She finds that the 1980s, often described as "the decade of greed," was actually a more complicated period, during which Calvin Klein jeans as well as suits by Armani became notorious yuppie status symbols. And she shows that the fashions of the 1990s, emphatically postmodernist, have repeatedly returned to the themes of retro, ethno, and techno styles.
The corset
1. Steel and Whalebone: Fashioning the Aristocratic Body 2. Art and Nature: Corset Controversies of the Nineteenth Century 3. Dressed to Kill: The Medical Consequences of Corsetry 4. Fashion and Fetishism: The Votaries of Tight-Lacing 5. The Satin Corset: An Erotic Iconography 6. The Hard Body: A Muscular Corset. The corset is one of the most controversial garments in fashion history. This study explores why women continued to don steel and whalebone corsets for 400 years, and why they finally stopped. It also discusses the cultural history of the corset, demolishing myths and revealing its significance.