Steele, Valerie: - Valerie Steele, an internationally renowned authority on the history of fashion, is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Described in The Washington Post as one of "fashion's brainiest women", she is a prolific author, combining serious scholarship with a rare ability to communicate with the general reader. She is the author of more than a dozen highly acclaimed books including A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, Shoe Obsession, Gothic: Dark Glamour, The Corset: A Cultural History, Fifty Years of Fashion, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, Women of Fashion: 20th-Century Designers. rom the Inside Out. She is also editor-in-chief of a three-volume Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion.