Victorian fashion history to be topic

History of Victorian fashion to be Steele's Fox-Adler topic

"A New Look at Victorian Fashion" is the title of the annual Fox-Adler Lecture at Skidmore, to be presented Thursday, Sept. 27, by Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City.

Free and open to the public, the illustrated talk will begin at 5:15 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

A scholar of fashion and culture, Steele is the author or editor of 14 books, including The Corset: A Cultural History (2001, Yale University Press), Shoes: A Lexicon of Style (1999, Rizzoli International), Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (1996, Oxford University Press), and Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (1985, Oxford University Press). She is the founder and editor of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture.
She also has contributed essays and articles to publications ranging from Vogue to the Yale Journal of Criticism.

A popular lecturer, Steele has discussed fashion topics at symposia and conferences throughout the U.S. and abroad, such sites as the Smithsonian Institution and before the Victorian Society in America, as well as at events in Moscow; Paris; Cape Town, South Africa; Brisbane, Australia; and Seoul, Korea.

She is a widely quoted expert on fashion, appearing in The New York Times and on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, and Good Morning America, among others.

The Museum at FIT houses one of the world?s largest collections of clothing and textiles. Steele has organized more than 30 major exhibitions there over the past seven years. In addition, she established a permanent gallery of fashion and textile history, an annual scholarly symposium on fashion, and developed Fashion Culture, a regular program of lectures and gallery tours.

Her awards and honors include the 2003 Artistry of Fashion Award from the American Apparel and Footwear Association and the 2002 Iris Foundation Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts from the Bard Graduate Center.

Steele is a summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College, where she earned a B.A. degree in history and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Yale University, she earned two master?s degrees as well as a Ph.D. degree in modern European cultural and intellectual history.

Skidmore?s Fox-Adler Lecture Series was inaugurated in 1991 in honor of Hannah Moriarta Adler, a Saratoga Springs native and avid collector of 18th- and 19th-century books, drawings, and porcelains. In 1967 she loaned her extensive collection of 19th-century books to Skidmore, and they remain at the college?s Scribner Library courtesy of Norman M. Fox, who took charge of the collection upon Mrs. Adler?s death in 1989.