When you picked out an outfit this morning, did it really feel like free will? Was it a sequence of deliberate selections that made it fascinating to enterprise out into the world sporting mentioned garment? Or was your determination a response to deeper unconscious forces? What if the alternatives we make about garments aren’t our personal acutely aware selections to make?
That’s the premise of a brand new exhibition in New York. “Dress, Dreams and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis”, on the Fashion Institute of Technology, that makes the case that garments are the “deep surface”, the “changeable, renewable second skin”, that outdoors the merely sensible act as a facade for way over we all know.
As Dr Valerie Steele, the curator often known as “the Freud of fashion”, places it, vogue “communicates our unconscious desires and anxieties, with none of us fully aware of the messages we send.” From her perspective, “far from being superficial, fashion exposes people’s desires and anxieties like a psychosomatic rash.”
For psychoanalysts, vogue has at all times been a canvas for deeper exploration. Sigmund Freud didn’t talk about garments in his work, and was pretty buttoned up in his personal selections, however in letters to his spouse, Martha Bernays, he revealed an opinion that girls used “frivolous and fancy dress” to show their our bodies, whereas males exhibited “passive exhibitionism” with hats and coats as stand-ins for male sexuality. Follower Carl Jung argued that garments act as a psychological “mask”, a compromise that we make between our interior self and the exterior show we placed on to the world. But Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst near the surrealists, went additional. He argued that identification will not be acutely aware freedom: it’s fashioned beneath the floor, within the psyche.
For Lacanian psychoanalyst Dr Patricia Gherovici, who consulted on the exhibition: “fashion is a way of dressing up the death drive”. As properly, she says, as there being “something in making our mortal bodies look a little better.”
This present, which Steele spent 5 years placing collectively, locations 100 seems beneath the psychoanalytic lens, from the nineteenth century to the current. Displays embody designs by Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and John Galliano, who designed a “Freud to Fetish” assortment for Dior in 2000.
“We live in a society where the body needs to be constantly dressed and the outfit becomes part of the skin we inhabit,” says Steele. “The determinations we make come with conscious – and unconscious – intentions that carry enormous transformative power.” In different phrases, to telegraph to ourselves and others who we’re and who we might want to be; it’s only a primal battle within the psyche taking part in out.
But the exhibition argues that this analytical strategy additionally comes from the designer, with some actively deploying psychoanalytic curiosity into their garments. McQueen’s 1998 Joan [of Arc] instructed the story of the Catholic martyr who was burned on the stake quickly after refusing to put on ladies’s garments; and 2007’s Witches and Persecution featured attire referencing the violent ritual of shaving the hair of girls discovered responsible of witchcraft previous to execution. While some have accused him of misogyny – the exhibition notes embody a reference to psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler who described homosexual male vogue designers, reminiscent of McQueen, as “women’s bitterest enemies” – Lacanians, in line with Steele, “tend to argue his fashions were empowering”.
Perhaps no designer drank extra deeply from the font of psychoanalysis than Elsa Schiaparelli, who was associates with psychoanalysts, together with Lacan, in addition to psychoanalytically impressed surrealists Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti. For this exhibition, Steele selected a night jacket with embroidered rococo hand mirrors with fractured faces – Schiaparelli’s designs typically used mirrors. It’s no large leap from right here to Lacan’s idea of the Mirror Stage, wherein a baby first begins to recognise itself within the gaze of the mom. “Lacan’s idea is that self-image is based on how other people look at you, starting with your mother,” says Steele. And Schiaparelli was definitely coping with points born out of a crucial mom’s gaze. “Her mother told her repeatedly that she was ugly.”
Interestingly, Steele, till now, has typically addressed clothes via the lens of sexuality and gender. “But now,” she says, “I’m much more conscious of how they’re used to conceal vulnerabilities.”
Among the items, there’s additionally a brief, reddish-brown costume by multidisciplinary artist Jenni Dutton created from hair, which Steele had created for the present. Hair will be “very freaky for people, especially if it’s in the wrong place,” she says, earlier than providing a psychosexual, Freudian interpretation of the costume’s hypothetical wearer as signalling, by clothes themselves in nothing however hair, that they need, in actual fact, to be bare. Most individuals, it’s truthful to say, completely don’t wish to be bare in public, however the query of how a lot nudity is in vogue at any given second, how a lot you or I resolve to flash or conceal, has deeper ranges to unpack. The rise of nude vogue now, says Steele, could also be a response to Ozempic transferring the needle again on physique positivity, in addition to carrying a robust political cost towards authoritarianism.
Then there’s a teal-coloured, cinched-waist costume by Anne Fogarty, a US designer from the Nineteen Fifties, which speaks to mid-century concepts of gender building but in addition gives a prism via which to consider the up to date trad-wife development. According to Steele, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere “spoke of a feminine masquerade to reassure men they are not really powerful and dangerous,” Steele says.” “When you talk about women masquerading as women you’re really in the realm of fashion,” says Steele.
It’s this talent for seeing garments via the prism of analysts that offers Steele a recent and mental tackle present tendencies – a manifestation of that want for a changeable new pores and skin, which the exhibition describes as the place “unconscious emotions and fantasies take symbolic form”.
There’s no dialogue of vogue and psychoanalysis that leaves out the phallus. Freud began it along with his theories of the oedipal complicated and the phallic stage of psychosexual improvement, however Lacan took it additional positing that neither intercourse possesses it. Steele paraphrases: “Men think their penis is the phallus, and they hope it is, but women embody the phallus.”
Nowhere is that this extra prescient, fashion-wise, than in excessive heels. It’s not, says Steele, that girls choosing stilettos are “collecting phallic symbols, nor is it they’re dressing up in fetish clothes for men. Men may be out there fetishising all over the place, but what are women doing? Every dominatrix I’ve spoken to says they are to show who is in charge.”
Of course all of this – our “renewable second skin” – is at all times altering, and the problematic nub of our metamorphosing needs is their toll on the atmosphere. Steele says there’s a stress right here, which leaves vogue customers in a psychoanalytic predicament. The want to buy, or slightly to dress in a metamorphosing second pores and skin is in line with Steele, a consumerist embodiment of the intercourse drive, or Freud’s Eros. But Eros is in battle with Thanatos, the loss of life drive; on this case the data of the real-world ecological implications of consumerism. It’s arduous to say which is able to win out, Steele acknowledges. Perhaps neither.
“Many people who love fashion are also feeling hostile to it, in part because they see it as part of the destruction of the Earth,” says Steele. “I’m starting to feel like there’s some huge death drive, with people unwilling or feeling powerless to stop it, but they also want novelty, because a new dress is like a new skin.”
If psychoanalysis may also help us perceive the foundation of our procuring behavior, maybe it will probably assist us kick it. But we’re nonetheless none the wiser how to verify, as soon as and for all, that we picked our garments.
Dress, Dreams and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis at The Museum at FIT is on now till the 4th January 2026.
By Edward Helmore