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Special Lecture: Dr. Valerie Steele “Fashion Exhibitions at The Museum at FIT”
Date and Time: Saturday, June 7, 2025, 14:00-16:00 (doors open at 13:30)
Speaker: Dr. Valerie Steele (Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at FIT)
※Consecutive interpretation available, Advance reservation required
Moderator: Hiroko Hirayoshi (Professor, Graduate School of Human Development and Environment, Kobe University)
Venue: Tokyo Opera City Building, 7th Floor Conference Room.
Access Information
※Please take the high-rise elevator from the 2nd-floor office lobby of Tokyo Opera City to the 7th floor.
Capacity: 70 attendees (First-come, first-served. Registration will close once capacity is reached.)
Admission: Free of charge
A same-day admission ticket to the exhibition "Love Fashion: In Search of Myself" at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (scheduled to open on April 16, 2025) is required for entry. Please present your ticket stub or online ticket purchase screen at the lecture reception.
Special Website for the LOVE Fashion Exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

About the Special Lecture:
The Museum at FIT, affiliated with the Fashion Institute of Technology (a part of State University of New York), is one of the few museums in the world specializing in fashion. Established in 1969, the museum houses a collection of over 50,000 garments and accessories spanning from the 18th century to the present, along with thousands of textiles. It systematically researches and preserves these materials and has organized numerous significant fashion exhibitions, including Fashion and Surrealism and Three Women: Kawakubo, Vionnet, McCardell.

Dr. Valerie Steele, who has served as Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at FIT since 2003, has curated over 25 fashion exhibitions, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body and Gothic: Dark Glamour. She is also the founding editor of the academic journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, launched in 1997, which has played a major role in advancing interdisciplinary research in fashion studies.

This lecture commemorates the exhibition Love Fashion: In Search of Myself at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Dr. Steele will introduce The Museum at FIT's collection and share insights into the exhibitions she has curated. Drawing from her extensive experience in fashion exhibition planning and management, she will provide a historical overview of fashion exhibitions, analyze current trends, and explore the future of fashion curation.　

　　
Organizers:
The Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) "Comprehensive Study on the Japanese Development of Fashion Exhibitions in Museums" (JSPS23H0057, Principal Investigator: Hiroko Hirayoshi)

For Inquiries: The Kyoto Costume Institute, Sen Isozumi (isozumi@kci.or.jp)

This lecture is a related program of the exhibition "Love Fashion: In Search of Myself" (April 16–June 22, 2025), co-hosted by Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation and The Kyoto Costume Institute, at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.


Photo by Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for FIT

Biography: Valerie Steele
Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has organized more than 25 exhibitions since 1997, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body, London Fashion, Gothic: Dark Glamour; A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color and Paris, Capital of Fashion.

She is also the author or editor of more than 30 books, including Paris Fashion, Women of Fashion, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, The Corset, The Berg Companion to Fashion, and. Fashion Designers A-Z: The Collection of The Museum at FIT. Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. In addition, she is founder and editor in chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, the first scholarly journal in Fashion Studies.

Steele combines serious scholarship (and a Yale Ph.D) with the rare ability to communicate with general audiences. As author, curator, editor, and public intellectual, Valerie Steele has been instrumental in creating the modern field of fashion studies and in raising awareness of the cultural significance of fashion. She has appeared on many television programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show and Undressed: The Story of Fashion. Described in The Washington Post as one of “fashion’s brainiest women” and by Suzy Menkes as “The Freud of Fashion,” she was listed as one of “The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry” in the Business of Fashion 500: (2014 to the present).