I first read Interpretation of Dreams when I was about 14 or 15, and I left school when I was 15, and lived in a commune. I never finished high school, but I eventually went to college. And then, in graduate school, I went to Yale to get my PhD in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. I had an epiphany when I realized fashion is part of culture, and I can do fashion history. Which made me essentially unemployable for more than a decade, because no history department would hire someone working on such a fluffy, frivolous subject. But this intrigued me that fashion was seen as being so superficial.

It became clear to me early on that this was in large part because fashion is literally superficial. It's on the surface of your body, and because of mind-body dualism, the body was often denigrated, particularly when it was a female body. So, it seemed to me that in reality, fashion is significant and important precisely because of its intimate connection with the physical body, which is so closely related to the development of the sense of self.  That your psychic sense of yourself is as an embodied self. We are embodied.

One of my professors at Yale was Peter Gay, who was Freud's biographer. Even when he was my professor, he was studying psychoanalysis and writing books like Freud, Jews and Other Germans and Freud for Historians. So, I was familiar with Freud, but not so much with later psychoanalysts. I used psychoanalytic thought in my doctoral dissertation about the erotic aspects of fashion, because if you're talking about eroticism, you have to pay attention to psychoanalysis.

Later, when I did exhibitions and books such as The Corset, or Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power or Gothic: Dark Glamour, psychoanalysis would pop in occasionally. But when I did A Queer History of Fashion, I hardly mentioned it because Freud was so clearly the enemy as far as most LGBTQ people and feminists were concerned. 

In 2012, the fashion journalist Susie Menkes did a whole profile of me, which she titled The Freud of Fashion. I was flattered, of course, but also a little nervous and embarrassed because people didn't think much of Freud in 2012. A couple of years later, in 2015, I was invited to speak about Freud and fashion at a conference that the London College of Fashion organized in conjunction with the Freud Museum in London.

And I gave a little talk about Freud's ideas and some of Flügel's ideas. While at that conference, I met several psychoanalysts who were Lacanian psychoanalysts. And so I thought maybe I should look into that. Reading Lacan is like fighting your way through a jungle with no machete, just a dull butter knife. It's very hard to understand what he's saying, and I would write to Anoushka Grose, and say, “what does he mean by this?” After that I started thinking about a show about fashion and psychoanalysis. 

I read other contemporary analysts, and pieced together, laboriously, what different people thought, and gradually built these into a more or less coherent book. I didn't want to just write the introduction to a book. I wanted to see if I could actually do a cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis. So it took more than 5 years—a hell of a lot longer than most exhibitions and books.