Valerie Steele

In a nutshell

Dress, Dreams, and Desire is a book on the cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis. It traces how psychoanalytic ideas have influenced fashion and how we interpret fashion.

On the one hand, you have Freud's writings, where he barely mentions clothing or fashion at all. Just tiny little intriguing slivers, like the libido for looking, or the attraction of concealment. And yet, when you look at his personal letters to his fiancée, he talks a lot about the anxieties and desires he has when he is shopping for clothes. So, there's this tension that psychoanalysts are not supposed to be very interested in fashion, and yet we find that they are often interested in fashion. Jacques Lacan, for example, only mentions fashion occasionally, but was obviously quite obsessed with dressing up. And he comes up with ideas, like the mirror stage, which can tell us a lot about the development of a person’s self-image, and how that can be expressed in clothing.

I trace how psychoanalysis influenced society. For example, in the 1920s, when Freud began to be widely translated, a lot of people started identifying psychoanalysis with personal and sexual freedom, particularly for people who had been rather repressed, like young unmarried women or members of sexual minorities. And then later in the 1950s, especially in the United States, psychoanalysis becomes very conservative, homophobic, misogynistic, etc, to the point where a lot of women and gay men started thinking that Freud was the enemy.

However, some psychoanalysts took a more progressive, even radical stance, and began to argue that psychoanalysis is potentially very freeing because it can tell us a lot about people's unconscious desires and anxieties, which often have to do with their feelings about their body. For example, why do some people hate or fear women or gays?  What causes group hatred? I look at key ideas in the history of psychoanalysis, from dream theory to the mirror stage to the phallic woman, and try to interpret clothes through them. In a long nutshell, that's the book.

Can you elaborate on an example of how the history of psychoanalysis is interpreted through clothes?

Let's take Freudian dream theory. Pretty easy to understand. Most people know something about Freud's sex and dream theories. He talks a lot about sexual symbolism, particularly phallic symbolism, and about how dreams are often repressed expressions of sexual wishes, and sometimes also aggressive wishes. In Dress, Dreams, and Desire, I show this marvelous dress that Jeremy Scott designed for Moschino. It's a chocolate bar dress - a Hershey's chocolate bar. And I talk about how a chocolate bar is kind of a phallic symbol. It's also a symbol of oral pleasures, and, you know, chocolate melts in your mouth. So a woman wearing a dress that turns her into a chocolate bar is implying, perhaps jokingly, that women's bodies are good enough to eat. So it's very sexual.

This is quite different from Carl Jung's dream theory, where it's more about archetypes in the collective unconscious. So, for example, fashion designers often use feminine archetypes, the queen, the lover, etc, but in one case, Rick Owens makes a more esoteric choice. He does an entire collection entitled Priestesses of Longing. It is a feminine archetype, but it's an interestingly esoteric one.

There are other later psychoanalysts, such as Didier Anzieu, who developed his concept of the skin ego from Freud's idea that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego. A baby is a little creature of sensations, who puts its hands in its mouth to understand  'oh, that's me'. The baby is being held by its mother, or some other caregiver. So it feels a sense of security if it's held closely, but not too hard, and can develop a sense of its own bodily dimensions, a sort of body and surface ego. This is not dissimilar to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage: The mother's gaze is the child's first mirror, and if it's a relatively loving gaze, or an accepting one, then the child gets a fairly good self-image. In both cases, though, if things are not the way they should be, there can be problems, and often a sense of fragmentation.

Now, clothes can, in some ways, help provide a secondary skin that will re-narcissize you, when you're feeling fragmented or falling apart. Fashion designers often talk this way. You know, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin said he wanted his clothes to be like a hug. And, Yohji Yamamoto said, 'my clothes are like armor that protect you from unwelcome eyes'. So both looking and touching can be reassuring but also threatening. Clothes, in a way, talk about how we feel vulnerable — we want to be seen, but we want to be seen in a good way. And we can also be vulnerable if people are not seeing us, if the world is indifferent to us. So clothing can make you visible to a possibly indifferent world, while also providing dark glasses that hide your vulnerabilities.

The close-up

The appearance of a book is very important to me. I was playing with different images, but none of them were quite right. I wanted a fashion image, but I also wanted it to say psychoanalysis. We hired a graphic designer to do things for the museum exhibitions, and we have a very good one who works under the name Sarko (Steven Sarkowski). He came up with this wild graphic lettering, which really sort of looked like the lettering you do for a Hitchcock film. It kind of was too radical for the publisher. They toned it down a little bit, but I liked that red graphic design, and then it suddenly occurred to me that we had a wonderful bustier by Issey Miyake, a female torso, which was bright red, and we could use that on the cover too. The bustier and the graphics really tied together the body, fashion, and psychoanalysis. I am very happy with the look of the book.

Similarly, the exhibition walks you through the history of fashion and psychoanalysis. But I also wanted to plunge people into the unconscious and the world of dreams. As soon as you enter the second, larger gallery you were confronted by a mirror, and then a few things like, fetish boots, gloves, and then after that, you wander through a labyrinth with peepholes, and you come across vignettes of the mirror stage or the death drive or a platform about ugly emotions. There was a platform with looks by McQueen, and another with Gallianos. This helps fashion people understand some of these complicated ideas.

Lastly

I'm a fashion historian, not a psychoanalyst. When we had our big symposium the other day, we had a lot of psychoanalysts in the audience. I'm hoping analysts will read this book too, but for them, it will probably be, 'this is interesting, how's she bringing fashion in?' But most of my readers are fashion people. I tried to write it in a way that was accessible to people who like fashion, and who maybe don't know much about Freud, and I try to reassure them, 'you know more about Freud than you think you do'. Fashion designers frequently refer to psychoanalysis. Marc Jacobs did a Freudian slip dress; John Galliano did a whole collection for Dior, called Freud or Fetish. We all know something about fetishism or about dreams. I wanted to make it reassuring.

Early on, when I wrote a 50-page first draft, and I showed it to my husband, he said, 'This is boring. Your fans don't want to read in-depth about psychoanalysis'. I was so angry, I didn't talk to him for days, but that was useful. I had to plow through the psychoanalytic ideas before I could understand how to make them palatable. I'm not going to dump 50 pages about the Oedipus Complex. People don't want to read that.

I'm also hoping that fashion people will realize that we all interpret each other's clothes. These are just some interesting ideas that you might add to your repertoire as you're looking at a fashion show or some wild and crazy fashion look on the runway, you might think, 'oh, you know, you could interpret that as being about this'. There are some sexier styles that a lot of second-generation feminists find horrible, “that's turning women into a sexual object”. You might think, 'well, no, as Joan Riviere and Judith Butler say, maybe it's more like femininity is a kind of performance'. The art historian Linda Nochlin suggested that 'maybe the great designers create new forms of the feminine that women can play with for their own pleasure and interest'. Men usually deny that they have fashion and wear just a kind of uniform. Yet, some men, at least, especially gay men, are quite adept at playing with the masquerade of masculinity as well.