Valerie Steele

Curator; Writer / Fashion Design / United States / The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology

www.fitnyc.edu/museum / www.valeriesteelefashion.com

Books Every Fashion Designer Should Read

I never read a book that changed my life, but I did read two scholarly articles on the significance of the corset that launched me on my career and, thus, really did change my life forever. . . . It was as though a lightbulb suddenly went on, and I realized: “Fashion is part of culture.” . . . View the complete text

I never read a book that changed my life, but I did read two scholarly articles on the significance of the corset that launched me on my career and, thus, really did change my life forever.

I was in graduate school at Yale, and my classmate Judy Coffin gave a presentation about two articles in the feminist journal Signs—one by Helene Roberts, which was a standard feminist critique of the corset as a fashion oppressive to women, the other by David Kunzle, claiming that tightly laced corsets could be sexually liberating for Victorian women. It was as though a lightbulb suddenly went on, and I realized: “Fashion is part of culture. I can do fashion history.”

But when I went to the library, with a few exceptions, all I found were either antiquarian studies of “costume history” or fashion journalism. Fashion history did not really exist as a field. So when I began working on fashion, I made myself essentially unemployable—at least by any “normal” university.

The first book that seemed to offer any kind of hope was Anne Hollander’s Seeing through Clothes, but that was art history, and I was in the history department (although I did take some art history classes with Jules Prown and Robert Herbert that had a big influence on my later work). I was a naive graduate student, so when I read David Kunzle’s book Fashion and Fetishism, I thought that meant that the corset had already been “done,” so I wrote my dissertation on the erotic aspects of Victorian fashion—with a long chapter on the corset, that disagreed with both Kunzle and Roberts. That became my first book, Fashion and Eroticism.

It wasn’t until almost 20 years later that I finally wrote The Corset, after organizing a major exhibition on the subject. In between, I wrote what was probably my best book (and certainly the most fun to research), Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power. Recently, I’ve been writing mostly exhibition catalogues, like Gothic: Dark Glamour.

Over the years, I’ve built up a library of about 2,500 fashion books—including a sub-collection of books by the fin-de-siècle French writer Octave Uzanne, such as La Femme à Paris. Some day, I hope to write a book about Uzanne's ideas about fashion and the femme fatale. I've also spent many happy hours in libraries around the world, from the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs in Paris to Berlin’s Lipperheide Costume Library and the library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1997, I founded Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, which has helped provide an interdisciplinary forum for new publications on fashion.

I don’t know how many fashion designers actually read books; it’s my impression that a lot of them are “visual” people, who would rather flip through magazines and look at pictures. On the other hand, most fashion books do have pictures, and there are certainly many intelligent and creative designers who might be interested in discovering some intriguing titles. To that end, I’ve drawn up the following list of books on fashion that I think are really brilliant.

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Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister

Now is Better

By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023

Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

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Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

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Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman

Love Letter to a Garden

By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025

From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.

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Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber

Milton Glaser: POP

By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023

This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

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Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)

By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023

This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.

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