War as a Fashion Statement

The title "Love and War: The Weaponized Woman" is certainly intriguing. It is the name of the current exhibition at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology. To find out more, I spent a recent afternoon both looking at the exhibition and speaking to Valerie Steele, the show's curator. Steele—who at one time taught here in the Liberal Arts Department at Juilliard—has since become a world-renowned fashion historian, with 17 books to her credit.

Steele holds a doctorate in cultural and intellectual history from Yale and is well-known for her fascinating and often provocative exhibitions. This one is no exception. Here she considers the influence of war as a metaphor—a "style thing," she said. Her intention was not to focus on military outfits and camouflage, but rather, the polarity between armor, which she characterizes as a "hard exoskeleton," and underwear, which serves more as a "soft, intimate second skin."

Above: Robot couture by Thierry Mugler (center), with Renaissance breastplates from the Higgins Armory Museum. Below: Red sequined Joan of Arc dress by Alexander McQueen. (Photos by Irving Solero/Jennifer Park, courtesy the Museum at F.I.T.)

Her point of departure, Joan of Arc, is as unlikely a fashion icon as you could find. But many renowned actresses have worn armor for precisely this role. In one gallery is displayed a poster of the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt playing the part of the 15th-century teenage martyr. For the show, Steele sought out major designers, such as Miuccia Prada, who have demonstrated their weariness with passive women, instead emphasizing a show of strength.

The exhibition takes place in two rooms. The introductory gallery establishes the theme of the exhibition, displaying both actual armor and lingerie. We then enter a very large room filled with mannequins. Most are female, but none have hair, and many are headless dressmaker models. (This cannot help but evoke new insights about the word "mannequin" itself, which comes from the Dutch word "manneken," literally meaning "little man.")

An undercurrent of the exhibition, Steele explained, is a dialogue about what is feminine and what is masculine. Some of the most eroticized fashion images involve metal chains or cyborg fashions. These invite questions not only about what is feminine, but what is human. The mechanized-robot look of clothing by Thierry Mugler, Issey Miyake, and others emphasizes the mechanics of the body. The fashion of the hard body, along with body-building fads, presents the body itself as a kind of armor, tacitly admitting that the body is a machine. The current exhibition also raises interesting questions about vulnerability. While the outfits are the opposite of 19th-century, baby-doll stuff, they are still very seductive in a fierce way—the opposite of passive, sweet femininity.

Steele was amazed to find the theme of "her show" in Paris couture presentations she attended last year, where she saw many articles of armor-like clothing. Told it would be impossible to obtain these outfits, she persisted, and things arrived from Paris the night before the show opened. Magically, everything came together.

Above: “White Stealth Look #1” by Boudicca, 2006. Below: Armor ensemble by John Galliano for Christian Dior haute couture (center), with wedding dress by Olivier Theyskens for Rochas (left) and camouflage ballgown by Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture (right). (Photos by Irving Solero/Jennifer Park, courtesy the Museum at F.I.T.)

The credit for the brilliant effects of this show goes almost entirely to Steele, who is now director and chief curator of the Museum at F.I.T. She has always loved fashion, but she told me that it wasn't until her first term in graduate school at Yale that a "light went on" for her, and she decided to pursue her ardor for the history of fashion. She had gone to Yale to study modern European cultural and intellectual history, but one day a classmate gave a talk on two interpretations of the Victorian corset—was it oppressive to women or not? At that point she realized studying the history of fashion was perfectly legitimate, although her professors thought it a "pretty stupid idea." But she maintained that it was simply because it hadn't been done before, and she turned all her classes into working on the subject. She went on to write her doctoral dissertation on erotic aspects of Victorian fashion, which became the first of her numerous books.

Steele worked for a year at the Smithsonian Institution in the costume collection before moving to New York, where she started teaching fashion history at F.I.T. as an adjunct. It paid very little. She told me she was "unemployable at regular universities because the history of fashion was so despised by the guys in tweed coats in history departments." After working as an adjunct at F.I.T. for 11 years—as well as at Juilliard, N.Y.U., Cornell, and Columbia—she was hired by the museum in 1996. In 1997 she became chief curator, and eventually the museum's director. Although she no longer teaches, she continues to lecture widely. As director, she is in charge of the artistic and intellectual course of the museum, which is part of F.I.T. and of the State University of New York (and one of only a handful of fashion museums in the world).

Steele spent a year and a half working on this exhibition, and also helped create a fashion-history gallery to showcase the museum's permanent collection of 80,000 objects. A comprehensive show currently on view in that gallery will close on November 10, when a new one opens. Steele describes the role of her museum as that of being "directional," or cutting-edge in history of fashion. As a museum for a school of fashion, it stresses contemporary aspects. Indeed, Steele compares it to a contemporary art museum. "You have to make an educated guess about which collections and which designers will stand the test of time," she says. Like a painting curator, she must use her eyes and her knowledge. But fashion, she says, is both part of history and has its own history. She is just now selecting the clothes to go into the new show in the history gallery, which will be titled "She's Like a Rainbow."

Note that "Love and War: The Weaponized Woman" (on view through December 16) is down one flight from the ground floor, where the history gallery is located. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology is on Seventh Avenue at 27th Street. Hours are Tuesday through Friday, noon-8 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.