Daughters of Decay: A Nite with Valerie Steel

by Daniel Wilson
“We’re not just talking about teenagers in black here,” said Dr. Valerie Steel at her wonderful but all too brief talk at the swish Bloor Street sunglass mecca Ilori. Dr. Steel was in town to promote her new book Gothic: Dark Glamour, a gorgeous glossy tome on the history of the gothic fashion movement and aesthetic. And she went far beyond teenagers in black.

Adriana Fulop (pictured left) and Ryan Webber, the duo behind the sharply tailored Toronto label Plastikwrap, were at the party dressed to the nines in their own creations. Plastikwrap has the distinction of being the only Canadian label included in the book and it sits comfortably in the pages between Givenchy, Oliver Theyskens and Thierry Mugler. Steel, in fact, mentioned Plastikwrap during her talk in the same breath as Galliano era Dior.

Dr. Steel’s talk danced quickly over the themes of sex and death, the symbolism of black and the iconic “ruined castle”. She quoted from the John Berger essay Leopardi where a personified fashion says to Death “Don’t you remember that both of us are daughters of decay?”, and told anecdotes about a teenage Rick Owens as a goth growing up in Kmart California reading Victorian fiction.

Photos were shown from Dr. Steel’s exhibit at The Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology and the gothic influence was pointed out in the works of Hussein Chalayan, Yohji Yamamoto and of course Alexander McQueen.

But it was Dr. Steel as a person that proved to be the most fascinating part of the night. Meeting outside for fresh air (Ilori is very narrow and seemed to have insufficient air flow for the number of people there), she was disarmingly charming and down to earth. She confessed her love of anime and corsets, told stories of the Gobi desert and Japan and explained how the Rodarte sisters’ collection was inspired by the way blood moves through water in Japanese horror movies.

It is refreshing that in the fashion world where so many people have over inflated senses of self importance that a woman who truly is important in the bigger picture can be so humble and simply friendly (which is also rather rare).