In “Fashion and the Unconscious,” a book from 1953, the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler describes a patient in her mid-thirties who wore so much gray clothing that her friends called her the Lady in Gray. When Bergler asked the woman why she dressed this way, she said simply, “I like it”—the kind of reply that, to a mid-century analyst, dangled like a red flag before a bull. Eventually, Bergler tells us, he excavated the unconscious motive for her gray attire: beginning in her late teens, the woman had spent six years composing music and devising ballets, but she gave up when the work on which she’d pinned her highest hopes—a tragedy about moths attracted to a great, beautiful light, who all end up burned to death—was rejected. Bergler grew convinced that, after her artistic dreams were thwarted, she’d begun to identify as one of these burned moths. “Aren’t moths—gray?” he asks her. He then triumphantly reports, “The patient did not answer.”
One senses that there may have been more to the woman’s silence than awestruck agreement, but Bergler cheerfully adds her to his portfolio of case studies, in which patients’ sartorial peculiarities are unfailingly traced to episodes from their pasts. An artist who always wears red claims to find the color “reassuring,” a feeling that Bergler comes to understand as rooted in an early exposure to Cecil B. DeMille’s film “The Ten Commandments” and its depiction of Moses parting the Red Sea. Another patient has a pattern of sleeping with married men and a penchant for wearing green dresses with gold accessories (or, occasionally, gold dresses with green accessories). Believing the two tendencies to be linked, Bergler diagnoses her with an ongoing rebellion against her mother, a literary critic who wore drab colors and once offered an unsatisfying explanation of a line from Goethe’s “Faust”: “My dear young friend, grey is all theory. The golden tree of life is green!”
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It’s easy to dismiss Bergler’s conclusions as far-fetched or suspiciously matchy-matchy. (It doesn’t help that he’s now often remembered for propounding the view that homosexuality is a curable disorder.) Yet his deeper idea—that our clothes may say things about us that we don’t realize we’re saying, like material slips of the tongue—is arresting. The fashion historian Valerie Steele takes this notion as a point of departure in her new book, “Dress, Dreams, and Desire” (Bloomsbury), which examines the surprisingly extensive interplay of fashion and psychoanalysis. Early on, Steele grounds her project in an idea she quotes from the British analyst Adam Phillips: “In psychoanalysis, we treat the objects of desire as clues.” (Phillips actually wrote, “We treat the objects of interest as clues.” Steele’s pivot to “desire” might itself strike an analyst as a clue.) A classic Freudian would read the desires expressed by clothing in terms of compensation and lack. Freud himself, according to Steele, once said, “The necktie is something that one can choose, that one can have as pretty as one wants it—which is, unhappily, not the case for the penis,” and elsewhere suggested that weaving had its origins in women wanting to conceal the missing phallus. But Steele is less interested in such theories than in using psychoanalysis as a lens through which to scrutinize the “power and allure of fashion, as well as the ambivalence and hostility that fashion also attracts.”
Steele is no stranger to this hostility. She describes arriving at Yale in 1978 to pursue a Ph.D. in modern European history and having an early encounter that made her worry about her future in the field:
For many years, Steele writes, “fashion continued to be ‘The F Word’ in much of academia” and was often treated as “a matter of surface appearances, shallow, not deep, and by extension not serious, meaningful, or important.” In the course of more than twenty books, she has insisted that it’s a mistake to think that surface and depth are in opposition. She prefers the idea of “deep surfaces,” a term used by the authors Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, who write that clothing “does not just operate as a disguising or concealing strategy” and that surfaces are as much the domain of the unconscious as are “the psyche’s innermost hidden depths.” Steele argues that, even as our garments afford unwitting glimpses of our unconscious lives, fashion visibly dramatizes the ways in which the self is not something that exists so much as something that we are constantly creating. “We are not born,” she writes, “but rather become who we are, and that becoming continues throughout our lives.” When it comes to clothes, we have no choice but to keep becoming. As Adam and Eve discovered, it’s impossible to wear nothing at all.
Steele’s book begins with an account of Freud’s obsession with being “tailored to perfection.” He wrote letters to his fiancée, Martha, expressing his anxiety about wearing the right clothes, and fantasized that he would one day be able to fill her wardrobe with dresses of the latest fashion. Steele writes that he often “confided in Martha about his latest ‘reckless’ purchase, be it a silver watch (‘Without a watch, I am really not a civilized person’) or ‘the two suits I need so urgently.’ ” For much of his life, he had his beard trimmed virtually every day, which meant that he was often late, including to his father’s funeral. (Unsurprisingly, this haunted his dreams.) Steele sees the young Freud as engaged in what we now call retail therapy, writing that “real and fantasied purchases of new clothing seemed to temporarily ward off anxieties related both to his status as a Jew in an antisemitic society and his precarious socioeconomic position.”
Steele’s fascinating book effectively traces a historical double helix, examining fashion designers’ lives and work in analytic terms and examining analysts’ attitudes toward dress, as expressed in their writings and sometimes in their wardrobes. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was notoriously dandyish—favoring mandarin collars and embroidered velvet coats, and often appearing in a purple-checked suit—whereas mid-century British analysts tried so hard not to draw their patients’ attention that their appearances became, as one scholar put it, “almost theatrically boring.” What a therapist should wear remains a subject of debate. The analyst and writer Jamieson Webster recently e-mailed me about her long struggle to figure out how to dress in a “neutral” way with patients, as her supervisors had advised her to do: “Spent YEARS trying to figure out how these people wanted me to dress, only to finally give up and dress like myself.” The idea that clothing could be “neutral,” she wrote, “finally just did me in.” Analysts or not, none of us can be neutral. Clothes are always saying something.
Perhaps the first big style shift of the psychoanalytic era came in the years after the First World War, with the rise of androgynous looks typified by the boyish profile of the flapper. Steele offers an analytic reading of Coco Chanel, who was known for her “chic and androgynous dandyism.” Abandoned at an orphanage by her father, Chanel invented a version of herself whom he had loved and doted on, even claiming that Coco was his fond childhood nickname for her. She then created styles that allowed her to become a version of the father she’d imagined having. Steele quotes what Chanel wrote about herself to her friend Salvador Dalí: “All her life, all she did was change men’s clothing into women’s: jackets, hair, neckties, wrists. Coco Chanel always dressed like the strong independent male she had dreamed of being.” Chanel’s description of herself in the third person was another act of self-construction—a way of distancing herself from her vulnerabilities and turning them into something sharp and stylized.
But it was Chanel’s rival, Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated more extensively with Dalí and claimed Surrealism as an inspiration. (Chanel allegedly derided her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.”) Steele focusses on Schiaparelli’s “Hall of Mirrors” evening jacket, designed for the winter 1938-39 season, interpreting it according to Lacan’s famous concept of the “mirror stage,” which he’d introduced a couple of years earlier. (She notes that both Schiaparelli and Lacan were friends with Dalí.) The idea was that an infant developed a sense of self by identifying with her reflection in a mirror, yet still felt a disconnection between the “wholeness” of that reflection and the disjointed experience of her own body. Schiaparelli’s jacket arguably evokes something comparable: impeccably tailored in black velvet, it has a highly structured silhouette but is covered with shards of broken glass arranged in the shape of two fractured mirrors.
Virginia Woolf had portrayed a similar tension between unity and fragmentation a decade earlier, with Mrs. Dalloway gazing at herself in the mirror:
For Steele, much of the sculptural, breathtaking artistry of haute couture finds a way to dramatize the friction between the composed selves we offer the world and the fragmented, chaotic sensation of being alive. We only look coherent; inside, it’s chaos.
As the twentieth century progresses, Steele moves from Christian Dior’s New Look—which brought back feminine opulence in the postwar period, with decadent skirts and cinched waists—to the rise of punk as a style that emphasized abjection, discomfort, and aggression. (Vivienne Westwood called it “confrontation dressing.”) Surveying the eighties, Steele examines the “hard body fashion” of Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier (think Madonna’s cone bra), which she considers alongside the notion of the “phallic woman.” She mentions that, while working on a previous book, “Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power,” she showed a group of analysts a famous photograph by Peter Lindbergh, published in a 1985 issue of French Vogue, of a woman in all black pushing a stroller and smoking a cigarette. As she recalls, “They immediately exclaimed: ‘The phallic mother!’ ”
Throughout, Steele draws on the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s concept of the “skin ego,” which casts skin as both container (“a unifying envelope for the Self”) and communicator (in Steele’s words, “an interface between the self and the world”). It is a useful way to understand clothing—as something simultaneously seen and felt—especially when it comes to the familiar conflict between wearing something because it feels comfortable (the envelope function) and wearing something because it looks good (the interface function). Think of the threshold moment of wriggling free from work clothes, or an evening gown, and pulling on a pair of wash-softened flannel pajamas. Many Gen Z-ers have collapsed the conflict by crafting a style that elevates ease above all—pajamas and pimple patches freely worn in public, promoting an aesthetic that exalts comfort rather than thwarting it. Steele finds an earlier example of this convergence in the French designer Sonia Rykiel, whose elegant knitwear ensembles of the seventies became emblematic of a turn from haute couture to ready-to-wear. “I go to Sonia Rykiel as one goes to a woman, as one goes home,” Hélène Cixous wrote, “dressed to the closest point to myself. Almost in myself.”
Steele positions Rykiel as an alternative to what Lacan termed “the Procrustean arbitrariness of fashion”—that is, fashion’s often antagonistic relationship to the body. (In ancient Greek myth, the robber Procrustes would torture his victims by making them lie on a bed that fit no one and stretching them or amputating bits of them accordingly.) Certainly, fashion, whether in its haute-couture form or in the standardized sizes of ready-to-wear clothing, frequently feels as if it’s designed for impossible bodies. Steele contrasts two designers of the nineties and two-thousands, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, by looking at their differing relationships to the female form. Galliano’s fashions, she writes, particularly his “body-worshipping, bias-cut evening gowns,” strove to “position the woman who wears them as the object of desire.” McQueen, however, wanted his designs to “provoke fear” and allow the woman to become a figure of terrifying power. His collections, with titles like “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” and “Highland Rape,” not so subtly gestured toward the violence often involved in producing or possessing beauty. His 1996 collection “The Hunger” featured a tailored silver jacket worn over a molded plastic corset that held wriggling masses of dirt-covered worms. McQueen’s work asks us to confront the ways that our awe at beauty can be marbled with disgust. The worm corset—a high-concept art piece that was also stubbornly, horrifyingly corporeal—was a kind of vanitas skull, a reminder of the body as vulnerable flesh even as it becomes the site of surreal artifice.
Steele pays particular attention to Galliano’s “Freud or Fetish” collection, from 2000, one of the most explicit intersections between fashion and psychoanalysis in the book, and also one of the least interesting. Galliano said that he wanted to conjure a “young child looking through the keyhole and seeing what the real world was about.” The collection invoked a series of fantasies and nightmares: a chauffeur his mother was sleeping with, a nurse with a giant hypodermic needle, “a kinky barrister” and a bejewelled French maid, a “crocodile woman” with an arrow stuck through a reptilian creature perched on her head. The designs are eye-catching, but they feel motivated by the surface tropes of psychoanalysis rather than by its inner engines.
Steele links Galliano’s crocodile woman to a metaphor of Lacan’s: “The mother is a big crocodile and you find yourself in her mouth. You never know what may set her off, suddenly making those jaws clamp down.” I found myself wishing that Steele would follow the crocodile even further, into an examination of the relationship between beauty and fear. By creating fashions that allow women to become overtly, even cartoonishly, frightening, Galliano points our gaze toward the human impulse to make art about the things that scare us—to follow objects of beauty back to the first things in this world to which we ever surrendered.
To accompany the book, Steele has curated an exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has been the chief curator for nearly thirty years. Many of the garments she discusses are on display, and standing in the same room as them, having previously seen them only on the page, is to realize how irreducibly material the power of clothing is. In person, one can see the long, bony appendages protruding from the shoulders of Anouk Wipprecht’s Spider Dress 2.0 (reminiscent of an alien skeleton), which are programmed to extend whenever a person comes too close, and a Kei Ninomiya dress made from white hair extensions and thin steel rods which looks like a dandelion puff coming apart in the breeze. Such encounters are reminders that the impact of fashion is often visceral: it hits us before we understand why.
This gap between impact and understanding is something that psychoanalysis feels singularly poised to help us wrestle with. But Steele’s project never quite addresses this gap directly, and I craved a fuller reckoning with the deeper questions motivating her inquiry: How can psychoanalysis aid us in understanding the ways fashion works on us—how it compels and repels us? How can clothing speak what we cannot yet bring ourselves to say?
In part, this is because Steele’s focus is more on designers than on the people who end up wearing their creations. Galliano, in a Profile in this magazine, described his runway shows as “fantasy time,” saying, “I want people to forget about their electricity bills, their jobs, everything.” But Steele’s exhibition made me wonder what the fantasy time of the runway can reveal about the quotidian fantasies involved in dressing ourselves—not apart from electricity bills and jobs but amid them. If we bring analysis from the runway to the closet, it invites us to explore how garments give us access to different versions of ourselves, offering an exhilarating outside—an entire rack of alternatives—to the claustrophobic delusion of a single, monolithic self. We are always becoming and reshaping ourselves, and what we wear expresses this state of perpetual flux. Selfhood is a shifting thing, as much outfit as skin, that is constantly performed, exchanged, and re-created. We might not even realize what we want to be until we find ourselves putting on a skin that feels nothing like our own.
I think of a pair of white pants I bought in Wales in 2003, while on a backpacking trip during college: skintight, with a big flare and a huge silver buckle, like nothing I’d ever worn, like something you’d find in a night club—or, more accurately, something that I, who had never been to a night club, thought you’d find in a night club. These pants weren’t “me,” but they gestured toward some things I didn’t yet know about myself: that I was interested in certain forms of recklessness, in a different relationship to my sexuality, in long nights that led to unknown places. These possibilities were part of what the pants offered me, even though I didn’t know why I bought them. The “me” I was familiar with hated being noticed, hated being seen; but the “me” who wore those pants was always noticed, because they were the most noticeable pants you could imagine—like a reflective vest worn at night. Those bright-white pants were how I told myself, without telling myself, that underneath my timid self was another part of me, softly crying out, with her flared hems and her silver buckle, “Look at me.” It was a way of speaking when I was too shy to speak, offering me shots of adrenaline in the face of my mildness.
Dressing, then, becomes a series of tiny risks and excursions, experiments in otherness. Getting dressed isn’t always an act of self-expression, just like writing isn’t always autobiographical. We might wear garments because they feel nothing like us—because they allow us to become, however briefly, strangers to ourselves. A garment invites us to invent a self that has never existed before, and then, when we take it off, to kill that provisional self—to keep shape-shifting with giddy abandon, a spirit of play and possibility born of faith in the eternal redo of the next morning, the next outfit, the next self. These days, I mostly wear clothes from thrift stores, which make the feeling of trying on other selves even more concrete, shimmying into the discarded snake skins of strangers and inviting them to haunt me.
But not all the selves we try on are anonymous. In my early twenties, I worked as a personal assistant for a moderately famous and monstrously egotistical magazine writer who lived in a palatial town house near Lincoln Center. Walking there from the subway each day, I passed boutiques that sold exquisite garments ten times more expensive than anything I’d ever owned. My employer, who’d had many assistants through the years, comfortably spoke about me in the third person, enumerating my many failures to others while I was standing right beside her. She brought me to tears at least once a day. But there was something intoxicating about her ambition, her productivity, and her power. Plus, the job paid well, including a tin box of “petty cash”—hundreds of dollars laid aside for lunches and other expenses.
Eventually, things got bad enough that I quit without giving any advance warning—something unlike anything I’d ever done. One Friday afternoon, I just walked out the door, leaving a note and ten résumés of possible replacements on her desk and taking with me the last of the petty cash. On my way home, I stopped at one of the beautiful boutiques and bought a camel trenchcoat that cost half my rent. I wore that coat every day that winter—I still wear it—because I loved it and because it reminded me of the side of myself I’d discovered that day. It was a wilder, more aggressive version, one that was willing to actually upset someone else. That’s what I told myself: that I wore the coat as a reminder of my freedom—how I’d left my boss in the lurch, got out from under her thumb.
Yes, I wanted so badly to be free of her that I wore a reminder of her every single day. After reading Steele’s book, I realized there was something I’d never admitted to myself: perhaps I wore the jacket not to commemorate leaving her but because some part of me wanted to be her. It was like mean-person drag. The coat allowed me to try on the parts of her I coveted but couldn’t quite admit I coveted: her willingness to prioritize her own needs, her raw ambition. When I wore the coat, I got to wear her mercilessness and her wealth. I got to fight her and beat her and become her all at once. ♦
