Valerie Steele is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, where she has organized more than 20 exhibitions, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body and A Queer History of Fashion. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Fashion Theory, and the author or editor of 30 books, including Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (1996), which has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.