Valerie Steele

The traditional image of the Victorian woman presents her as strait-laced and prudish, her clothing an outward sign of her sexual repression and exploitation. This situation supposedly persisted until the Women's Rights Movement and World War I forced the world to acknowledge that women were liberated individuals with legs. Yet Valerie steele demonstrates that eroticism formed the basis for the Victorian ideal of feminine beauty and fashion--indeed, that the concepts of beauty and fashion are essentially erotic. She shows that, far from being passive "sex objects," Victorian women, like their modern counterparts, themselves chose to emulate an erotic ideal as an aspect of their own self-fulfillment. Even the notorious corset was neither fetishistic nor an unhealthy instrument of torture, she argues, although its comlex and ambivalent sexual symbolism aroused controversy. Steele's conclusions are based on prodigious documentary evidence, including visual and material research, in costume collections in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, and even Japan. Fashion and Eroticism is not only a radical revision of the conventional understanding of Victorian fashion, it is a major contribution to the history of women and sexuality.

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.

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.