2009-03-16
© Aaron Cobbett
Scrutinizing an Armani
Valerie Steele is a fashion theorist and Director and Chief Curator at the museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, FIT. She is as at home in the front row at a fashion show as she is in the lecture theatre. Anja Cronberg met her during the fashion week in New York.
There seem to be innumerable young ladies with thin legs and alarmingly high stiletto heels getting in and out of taxis in New York. I get around on a rusty bicycle. After rushing breathlessly from one fashion show to the next in different parts of the city it is a nice relief to make a break in the schedule and enjoy a cup of coffee with Dr. Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) which is appropriately situated on Midtown’s Fashion Street.
A vision in black and splendid decadence
While I am waiting for Valerie, whom the New York Times once defined as the “High-Heeled Historian”, I take the opportunity of having another look at FIT’s much discussed exhibition “Gothic: Dark Glamour”, a vision in black and splendid decadence. Among the blood-red feathers and the glass creations by Alexander McQueen, metamorphic dresses by celebrated designs Comme des Garçons and Hussein Chalayan, a number of items in black fabric by Rick Owens, Ann Demeulemeester, Yohji Yamamoto and Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci, as well as more skulls than I could count, I tack my way between vampires of old and present-day Goths until it is time to take the lift a couple of floors to Steele’s office which is filled with books about fashion design from floor to ceiling.
Building bridges between academics and the industry
Valerie Steele has been a familiar face for both academics and designers since she took over the rudder at FIT six years ago. She has been assiduous in building bridges between academics and the industry and she has edited the periodical Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture for twelve years. Starting in 2009 she is also dealing with the more material aspects of fashion in Fashion Practice. Just as much at home in the front row at fashion shows and in the lecture theatre, Steele manages to be quoted by Vogue to the same extent that she is referred to in doctoral theses all over the world.
Three major exhibitions annually
But her main job is as chief curator at FIT where, together with her team, she mounts three major exhibitions each year in the main gallery of the museum as well as a handful of smaller displays in the other spaces. She explains that, prior to each new exhibition, the curators prepare themselves for about two years which is the time it takes to thoroughly research the subject, interview relevant parties, localize the items to be exhibited and find the necessary funding.
Problems with funding
Since there is no government support for the museum, funding is one of the most important aspects of planning an exhibition; an aspect that can open the institution to criticism and can create the sort of problems that every institution and curator has to deal with. Steele tells me how FIT organizes annual benefit lunches and how they thus manage to collect the basic funding that the museum needs each year. Besides what the lunches give, like all other museums, FIT is constantly looking for private companies that can make financial contributions.
Alliances with private companies
In conjunction with the Madame Grès exhibition in 2007, FIT’s managing director Patricia Mears managed to secure a substantial contribution from the Japanese company that owns the rights to the brand name, and “Gothic: Dark Glamour” received help from the Coby Foundation. These alliances with private companies are not free from problems, on the other hand.
Who would want to finance an Armani exhibition if not Armani?
Just as the Metropolitan Museum was subjected to highly vocal criticism when it mounted an Yves Saint-Laurent exhibition, the Guggenheim was later subjected to the same criticism for its Armani exhibition (see Madelaine Levy’s article). But every museum today has to continue to tread the fine line between gaining financial support for an exhibition at the same time that they have to preserve their integrity and their autonomic voice regardless of where the money comes from. Organizing exhibitions featuring living designers is always problematic, Valerie Steele claims. Who would want to finance an Armani exhibition if not Armani?
Public and media interest
Organizing exhibitions, regardless of whether the funding comes from government support or from private sponsors, is seldom a completely neutral process. Despite the fact that, over the last twenty years, fashion has enjoyed an enormous boom both with the public and the media, because of their associations with commerce, fashion exhibitions are regarded by many people as much too trivial, banal and even corrupt.
Purchasing cultural capital
The fashion houses themselves seem to suffer from some form of inferiority complex and are often to be found sponsoring art rather than fashion. Whether we are talking about the Fondazione Prada, Chanel Mobile Art or any of the other fashion houses that invests its money in art, it is difficult to avoid asking why these companies choose to sponsor a different form of cultural expression than their own. Art is considered to be the highest form of culture which, in turn, means that fashion houses which associate themselves with art are, in principle, buying themselves cultural capital at the same time that they signal that they have both an aura and authenticity that is above the commercial sphere that fashion is normally associated with, Valerie Steele explains.
Encouraging fashion houses to question the fashion industry
For artists, association with the fashion world gives a halo of glamour and, in the best instance, the possibility of reaching a mass audience. While consumers gain opportunities that they would not normally have, to access and enjoy a particular artist’s work. Steele mentions Takashi Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton a couple of years ago as an example of successful collaboration but she claims that the combination of fashion and art today has largely played out its role and she encourages the fashion industry to develop and question its activities itself. She maintains that the synergy between fashion and art is still relatively little researched and that, in spite of a number of exhibitions that have sought to deal with this subject in recent years, there are few that have succeeded in doing this well.
“Gothic: Dark Glamour” was positively received
Valerie Steele claims, instead, that the best exhibitions are those that manage to place the phenomenon of fashion or trends in their rightful context, noting the relations between designers and looking at how a specific designer relates to her or his epoch. For FIT, “Gothic: Dark Glamour” has been the most successful exposition, both as regards gate figures and positive reviews and Steele is highly satisfied herself with what the museum has achieved.
The Goth theme in popular culture and the museum world
Valerie Steele explains that, a couple of years ago, she was struck by the fact that Gothic culture had been an important and recurrent subject in the fashion world and that it had never been treated by museums. Not since the 1990s have we seen Goths on the catwalk and Steele felt that it was time for a revival. And she was right because fashion designers started to focus on drama and decadence at the same time that a similar aesthetic could be perceived in art, music and film. The FIT exhibition found a significant resonance in pop culture in general, according to Valerie Steele.
Forthcoming exhibitions at FIT
The next major exhibition at FIT will feature designer Isabel Toledo, FIT’s Couture
Council Award winner for 2008. This is Toledo’s first solo exhibition, coming at a well-timed moment considering that she has just dressed Michelle Obama on Barack Obama’s first day as America’s new president. After this there will be exhibitions about American and, in due course, Japanese fashion.
Make it possible to study creations by the major fashion houses
Valerie Steele is discreet about her ideal project but she admits that she sometimes dreams of organizing the first major, solo exhibition for either Alexander McQueen or John Galliano. To give an opportunity to people who have never been able to study a McQueen, a Galliano, an Owens, an YSL or an Armani creation at close quarters, and to let visitors observe these phenomenal creations at their leisure for just as long as they wish. That is the ultimate joy for a curator, Valerie Steele maintains.
Anja Cronberg
Editor of Acne Paper
Vikcorian dress from 1880. © MFIT
Dress fromAlexander McQueens collection “Voss” spring/summer 2001, inspired from mental institutions. © Alexander McQueen
Victorian jewellry from 1880 (“Revivalist Gutta Percha suite”). © MFIT |