Fashion meets Freud. A new exhibit explores clothes through a psychoanalytic lens
NEW YORK AP Fashion and Freud From top hats to stilettos bustiers to bullet dresses what we choose to put on our backs is interpreted through the lens of psychoanalysis in a new exhibit five years in the making Valerie Steele director of The Museum at FIT curated nearly designer pieces to offer a road map of sorts between fashion and such things as the unconscious mind the need for armor and the pull of desire And she noted during a walk-through of the exhibit a day before Wednesday s opening that Freud himself was a fashionista in rigidly conventional English-style suits made of the best materials and tailored to perfection While Steele has never spent time on a psychoanalyst s couch she s been intrigued by the practice s interplay with fashion for quite several time Ever since I was in graduate school when I started to focus on the history of fashion it seemed to me that despite all of the dead ends and real problems with psychoanalysis it did provide clues to explaining the power and allure of fashion as well as the hostility that is addressed to fashion she announced Here are chosen takeaways from the exhibit Dress Dreams Desire Fashion and Psychoanalysis which runs at the Fashion Institute of Instrument s museum from Sept to Jan Steele has written a companion book due out in November Father of psychoanalysis as fashion darling Historian Peter Gay once wrote We all speak Freud whether we know it or not Fashion is no exception As the exhibit notes Marc Jacobs put out a simple dress in called the Freudian Slip It was emblazoned with the image of Freud John Galliano created a collection for Dior called Freud or Fetish in It was an exploration of sexual fantasy I am trying to symbolize what fetishism evokes in the psychology of clothing Galliano revealed in his show notes Prada meanwhile debuted a film at the Cannes Film Festival in titled A Therapy It was directed by Roman Polansky and features Helena Bonham Carter as individual and Ben Kingsley as psychoanalyst At one point the analyst dons his individual s fur coat and gazes at himself in a mirror as we hear her ask What does it all mean Mirrors and Schiaparelli The exhibit includes a cropped black velvet jacket that Elsa Schiaparelli created back in It s called the Hall of Mirrors for trompe l oeil gold and silver mirrors at the breast with glass sequins and buttons that evoke classical busts It was a meditation on how women were culturally perceived Steele revealed the jacket has sometimes been interpreted as a reflection of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan s mirror stage of body image advance A baby looks in a mirror the theory goes and sees a whole person rather than a collection of fragmented parts But wholeness Lacan concluded is illusion Schiaparelli who died in spoke about a mother s gaze as a child s first mirror and how her own mother often declared her ugly to the point that she sometimes failed to recognize herself in a mirror So countless phallic symbols so much time Freud was way on board when it came to phallic symbols especially in dreams and broad cultural contexts Hello top hats and stilettos the ultimate phallic representations in fashion Steele disclosed The exhibit explores desire and sexuality including the idea of the phallic woman Steele included one of Jean Paul Gaultier s cone-bra dresses a style embraced by Madonna back in the day with protruding cones or bullets at the breast Freud certainly didn t invent the concept of phallic symbols or female sexual symbols These have existed for millennia everywhere from ancient Rome to ancient India but he saw them as being a crucial part of the human individual unconscious Steele stated Fashion and the naked body Freud saw clothes as loopholes for women to get around the idea of nudity as shameful It s an idea that plays out on runways in the present day A replica of the famous plunging green Versace dress that Jennifer Lopez wore to the Grammys is in the exhibit Naked dresses then proliferated on red carpets and fashion shows One of Freud s ideas was that people sought to show off their naked bodies and their genitals Steele noted It started with a bit of bosom and arm in evening dresses moving on to a splash of legs in the s and bare backs in the s British psychologist and psychoanalyst John Fl gel and later fashion historian James Laver in the s wondered whether erogenous zones in fashion shifted to maintain the male gaze Not so Steele reported The Hays Code was a more likely culprit in selected cases From to guidelines enforced by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America dictated what could and could not be shown on screen The idea of backs as sexy for instance evolved precisely because they were shown Steele reported Fashion as a second skin Fashion is often referred to as a second skin In the second of two rooms in the exhibit curators demonstrate how it s so much more What we wear Steele revealed can be holding you like a hug It can be protecting you like armor And it can be sexualizing either by framing bits of the naked body or by emphasizing say the curves and the muscles of the body Look no further than a red leather bustier by Issey Miyake from or a dress by Rei Kawakubo that demonstrates her use of structures that architecturally encase the body Contemporary French psychoanalyst Pascale Navarri quoted in the exhibit declared it this way What the look of fashion exposes is simultaneously our vulnerability about being seen and not being seen Source
