Clothes as signals clinicians notice

Abby and Patrick welcome Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, to discuss her new book, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, and the exhibition of the same name that opened this week. What does “fashion” mean, and why are so many psychoanalysts and cultural gatekeepers so resistant to think about the topic critically? How do society’s codes of dress reflect logics of identity, especially when it comes to gender, and how are those norms policed – and subverted? How does clothing mediate our first-person experience of our own bodies, how do clothes and nakedness recur in our fantasies and dreams, and how do we use attire to communicate with others while alternately armoring and revealing ourselves? A renowned historian and theorist of fashion, Dr. Steele masterfully walks Abby and Patrick through fashion as a field of overdetermined material commodities and complex articulations of identity and desire. From Freud’s anxieties about paying his tailor to Lacan’s florid wardrobe to ongoing debates over what therapists should and shouldn’t wear; from Elsa Schiaparelli’s mirror jackets to Jean Paul Gaultier’s bullet bras to Sonia Rykiel’s self-caressing knitwear to Timothée Chalamet’s Haider Ackermann halter; from commodity fetishism in Marx to fetish objects in Freud; from Lacan’s mirror stage to Joan Riviere’s theories of masking and masquerade to the “skin ego” of Didier Anzieu; from high culture to low, and from the runway to the consulting room and beyond, it’s a stylish and provocative grand tour of fashion, psychoanalysis, and the ways we all use clothes, like it or not, to literally fashion ourselves.

The exhibition Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis runs from September 10th 2025 to January 4th 2026 at the Museum at FIT (227 West 27th Street, New York, NY) and is free and open to the public: https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/exhibitions/dress-dreams-desire/index.php

Steele’s book Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis will be released on October 30th 2025: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dress-dreams-and-desire-9781350428195/

MFIT will host a Fashion and Psychoanalysis Symposium on Friday, November 14, 2025. Speakers include Laverne Cox, fashion designer Bella Freud, psychoanalysts Patricia Gherovici, Anouchka Grose, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Chanda Griffin, fashion scholar Simona Segre, and MFIT Director Valerie Steele. Attendance is free but registration is required: https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/events/symposium/fashion-and-psychoanalysis/index.php

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