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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Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy by John Lobell

Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy

By John Lobell
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: June 2020

Noted Louis I.Kahn expert John Lobell explores how Kahn’s focus on structure, respect for materials, clarity of program, and reverence for details come together to manifest an overall philosophy.

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Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn by Harriet Pattison

Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn

By Harriet Pattison
Publisher: Yale University Press
Forthcoming: October 2020

An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.

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Five Oceans in a Teaspoon by Dennis Bernstein and Warren Lehrer

Five Oceans in a Teaspoon

Poems by Dennis Bernstein
Visualizations by Warren Lehrer
Introduction by Steven Heller
Publisher: Paper Crown Press
Published: September 19, 2019

“From a kidnap note for a world held hostage by an A-bomb, to a Holocaust survivor’s tattooed arms where the numbers just don’t add up, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope... Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.” — Bob Holman, poet, poetry activist and chronicler, and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club

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Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger

Ballpark: Baseball in the American City

By Paul Goldberger
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: May 2019

An illustrated, entirely new look at the history of baseball: told through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic.

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Charleston Fancy by Witold Rybczynski

Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City

By Witold Rybczynski
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: May 2019

Charleston, South Carolina, which boasts America’s first historic district, is known for its palmetto-lined streets and picturesque houses. The Holy City, named for its profusion of churches, exudes an irresistible charm. Award-winning author and cultural critic Witold Rybczynski unfolds a series of stories about a group of youthful architects, builders, and developers based in Charleston: a self-taught home builder, an Air Force pilot, a fledgling architect, and a bluegrass mandolin player.

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Teaching Graphic Design History by Steven Heller

Teaching Graphic Design History

By Steven Heller
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: June 2019

An examination of the concerted efforts, happy accidents, and key influences of the practice throughout the years, Teaching Graphic Design History is an illuminating resource for students, practitioners, and future teachers of the subject.

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