JUST ANOTHER LIL’ TIDBIT OF SOME SCHTUFF TO THINK ABOUT
I think that the museum has become just another site for the display of fashion. When you walk down the street of New York, that’s a site of fashion. You can see all the great street style. When you go to see a show on the runway, that’s another site of fashion. When you go to a retail store and look at the way Simon Doonan has put the windows together, that’s another site. And the museum is yet another one, where maybe it’s slightly more abstracted or it takes you out of the trend aspect of fashion and makes you look at it from another angle… I would say that the main charges that say that fashion is not art and is different than art are because it’s more commercial. It’s more of a part of daily life, whereas art seems to transcend it’s commodity status—although obviously there is a whole art business. But I think if you look at it in historical terms, fashion appears to be something that is, perhaps, in the process of being re-imagined as art, the same way that photography and cinema and Jazz were before…
What’s interesting about fashion is that it is so much part of quotidian life and it’s something that—one way or another—touches everybody. And I think that that’s one reason it hasn’t been taken seriously, but it’s also one of the great things about working in fashion; everybody ultimately has some kind of interest [in] or response to it.
…I think that what I try and do is advance the knowledge of fashion and get people to realize that fashion is an important social and cultural phenomenon. That doesn’t mean that it’s not fun and it’s not sexy and it’s not immediate. I think that in the past, I fell between two schools. People in the academic world thought what I was doing was too fluffy and frivolous, and people in the fashion world thought I was being an egghead. But it’s like doing research on sex. Sex doesn’t stop being interesting and appealing to people just because you’re trying to analyze what’s going on.
- Valerie Steele, director and head curator of the museum at FIT, in Dossier
