CAA News Today

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We are delighted to announce that Valerie Steele will deliver the Convocation keynote address at the CAA 115^th Annual Conference!

Steele is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at FIT, where she has organized more than twenty-five 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, Paris, Capital of Fashion, and Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis.

She is also the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Women of Fashion, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, The Corset, Gothic: Dark Glamour, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis, 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 possesses a gift for communicating serious scholarship to a general audience. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Undressed: The Story of Fashion. Instrumental in the creation of the modern field of fashion studies, she has raised awareness of the cultural significance of fashion. Described in The Washington Post as one of “fashion’s brainiest women” and by fashion critic 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. Steele holds a PhD in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History from Yale.

CAA115 Convocation will be held on Wednesday, February 3, 6:00–7:30 p.m. ET at the New York Hilton Midtown. The event will also be livestreamed via YouTube.

Register now for the CAA 115th Annual Conference, February 3–6, 2027!