Quotes from Valerie Steele

Fashion is a part of the world and part of history. It's not a meaningless swirl of meaningless clothes. They (clothes) reflect the times.

Power dressing is combat gear for the trip to the top.

Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self.

The stiletto is the icon of erotic femininity. You're taller, thinner and curvier, all at the same time. What's not to like?

It is clear, for example, that many Americans did not like the idea of avant-garde art, especially in relation to women's fashion. Many people were particularly indignant about what seemed to them the deliberate obliteration of sexual attractiveness, which they identified with the tightwaisted dress and the hourglass figure.

In answer to the dominatrix at the Torture Garden, I would say that anyone who wears clothes, listens to music, goes to the movies, or is on the Internet might want to know more about fetishism. Certainly, anyone who is "into" fashion has to address the issue.

Fashions no longer trickle down, they usually bubble up from various subcultures, but contrary to what Polhemus believed, the creators of street style do not naturally evolve a pure and unchanging style, in contrast to fashion's artificial promotion of new, trendy fashions.

I am a cultural historian specializing in fashion, and the book you are now reading as part of an ongoing project on the relationship between clothing and sexuality. I am interested in exploring fashion as a symbolic system linked to expression of sexuality – both sexual behaviour (including erotic attraction) and gender identity.

Certainly, the sexual revolution influenced the course of fashion history. As we move into the twenty-first century and fashion becomes ever more erotic and taboo-breaking, we can clearly see how important a role the mini-skirt played in the development of women's fashion.

Doctors tended to blame mothers for encouraging their daughters to tight-lace in order to win a rich husband, while mothers often argued that their daughters persisted in the practice despite pleas to stop. Both doctors and members of the general public tended to believe that women's bodies were, by nature, weaker than men's.

As we shall see, the hardcore anticorset contingent included many (but by no means all) doctors and many (but by no means all) feminists. Medical ambivalence about corsetry may well have been related, at least, in part, to the profession's general opposition to feminist claims. But feminists and female doctors were themselves ambivalent about corsetry

Medical journals like The Lancet not only attacked specific fashions, such as corsets or tight-lacing, but also criticized the sex which worships the idol of fashion. Indeed, virtually, any criticism of Fashion rapidly moved into a diatribe on women's vanity and stupidity. Tight-lacing was so ill-defined and the practice apparently so ubiquitous that it seemed to prove all women's mental - and moral - inferiority. Tight-lacing came to stand for everything that was wrong about women.

Tight-lacers were frequently compared to suicides and infaticides, torturers and murderers. They were bad wome, who solicited the lecherous gaze of vulgar men. Specifically, they were bad mothers - at a time in the late nineteenth century when motherhood was seen as women's sacred duty.

By characterizing women as vessels of reproduction, physicians contributed to a discourse that interpreted the individual body as a sing of the health (or illness) of the social body.

It is certainly possible that some women might have felt ambivalent or embarassed about pregnancy, which could have led them to try to conceal the condition under tight corsets. It is also possible that some women deliberately used tight-lacing in an attempt to abort the fetus.

But reformers' attempts to devise less restrictive forms of female clothing, like the Bloommer costume, which proposed trousers for women, conjured up in many people's minds lurid images of unrestrained female sexuality and social liberty, including a veritable world turned upside down, were trousered women smoked cigarettes and hen-pecked men washed the laundry and took care of the children.

Tight corsets were accused of causing birth defects and weak, unhealthy children. It is difficult to interpret these historical accounts, however, since physical and moral injuries are often conflated. The mother becomes a scapegoat for anything bad that happens to her child

In recent years scholars and costume curators have increasingly realized that fashion must be placed firmly within its cultural and historical context;the study of dress cannot be separated from women's history, for example.