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Dressed: The History of Fashion
Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis: an interview with Dr. Valerie Steele
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- [00:00]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Yeah.
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Brian
Film Vault. We are one of the original film podcasts. That can't be true. There was like two other film podcasts when we began. Brian, how long are we doing this show? You and I first sat down and did a version of the show over 20 years ago. My God. Two episodes each week. One we reviewed movies and the first episode. The second one different top five every week. Movies that made you cry. Worst movie accents, most disturbing movies. All right, the Film Vault. Check it out wherever you find find podcasts. That's right, the film vaults. Going on 20 plus years.
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Cassie Zachary
Dress the History of Fashion is a production of dress media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get dressed.
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April Callahan
Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what, when of why we wear. We are friends, family fashion historians and.
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Cassie Zachary
Your hosts, Cassie Zachary and April Callahan. Dress listeners, for today's episode, feel free to don your nightcap and or remove your shoes as you lay back feet up on the couch. As today we are joined by none other than the, quote, freud of fashion. End quote. So dubbed by the fashion critic Susie Menkes. The one and only the Dr. Valerie Steele rejoins us today to speak about her long awaited exhibition, Dress Dreams and Fashion and Psychoanalysis, which is now on view at the museum at FIT through January 4, 2026.
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April Callahan
And you may remember that Dr. Steele last joined us on our very first season of Dressed April how does this time fly? So she joined us all the way back in 2018, which means we are wildly remiss in inviting her to join US Again, as Dr. Steele is one of the most influential respected fashion historians working today and has been for decades. She is a pioneer in our field. We all love her and are so indebted to her. And she is, of course, the author of more than 25 books on the history of fashion, and she's been a curator of more than two dozen fashion exhibitions since the 1980s. Dr. Still's groundbreaking work has paved the way for countless professionals in our field. And her newest exhibition is no exception.
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Cassie Zachary
That's right. The first of its kind, actually, to examine fashion in the context of psychoanalysis. Her show contains more than 100 items of dress, spanning more than 130 years of clothing history. And the exhibition draws on, quote, key psychoanalytic concepts about the body, sexuality and the unconscious, unquote. From fetish boots to Schiaparelli and McQueen, the fashions are interpreted via key concepts and and psychoanalytic theorists. This exhibition is A Do not miss, if you happen to be in NYC until the end of the year.
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April Callahan
Without further ado, Dr. Steele, a warm thank you for joining us again on dressed.
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Cassie Zachary
Dr. Steele, a long overdue welcome back to Dressed.
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Thank you.
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Cassie Zachary
Yeah. I am super delighted to speak with you today about your new exhibition, Dress Dreams and Desire, Fashion and Psychoanalysis. And I happen to know that this show is a culmination of many years of thinking and working on this subject. And it's also the first exhibition of its kind to explore dress within the practice of psychoanalysis. Could you tell us a little bit more about the germination of this topic? Because the intersection of fashion and psychology has been explored by many scholars in the past, but the intersection of fashion and psychoanalysis is a very niche path.
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes, most fashion studies have focused on history and sociology, and then in recent years, we have had a certain number of things on the psychology of fashion, but those tend to be kind of clinical psychology and, you know, involving tests about if you have college students wear a white jacket, will they feel more professional and test better? Things like that. I find that of limited interest or usefulness. What I'm interested in with psychoanalysis is the unconscious significance of fashion and also our unconscious emotions, which may influence how we feel about ourselves or our appearance, which sounds crazy. How can you be unconscious of your emotions? I mean, they're your emotions. You're feeling them. But if they're perceived as being ugly feelings like envy and you may repress them or you may project them onto somebody else, and so you'll be confused about what you're actually feeling.
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Cassie Zachary
And we're going to unpack some of these feelings today, as well as the fascinating work of many practitioners and theorists in the context of fashion. So, first off, could you tell us a little bit about how this show has been organized? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, there's something like 19 or so thematic sections, and these range from Freud and Fashion to Freud and Fetish to Desire and sexual differences. We also have sections on the Naked Dreamer and the Phallic Woman, which is a big, big subject throughout the exhibition. We're not going to have time to touch on all of these individually, so I'm hoping that maybe you could give us a little bit of an overview about how the show is organized.
- [05:31]
Dr. Valerie Steele
The show was organized after I had finished with the book. So the book basically took me five years. And the last year of that I was also really working intensively on the show, but the organization fell into place with the first section, the smaller gallery devoted to A kind of cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis, what was happening when, what was happening with fashion and intersections between them. So, for example, in the 1920s, psychoanalysis was perceived as being sexually liberating. And then in the 1950s, it was very homophobic and misogynistic, particularly in the United States, so that many feminists and LGBTQ people felt Freud is the enemy, whereas before he'd been sort of an inciter towards dangerous pleasures in earlier decades. So that was cultural histories, the first part. But then the second, larger part of the exhibition focuses on my using some key psychoanalytic ideas from various theorists and trying to apply them to items of clothing that I chose that seem to be effective in terms of showing something about that idea. So the idea might be something about Freud's versus Jung's dream theory, or Lacan's mirror stage, or Ancieux's idea about the skin ego, or changing ideas about what was meant by the phallic woman.
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Cassie Zachary
Yes. Well, within the exhibition, two of these names that you just mentioned, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, come up again and again as two of the main pillars of the exhibition. For any of our listeners who might not necessarily be familiar with their work or might need a refresher, like myself. It's been a minute since I've taken a psychology class. Could you give us a little bit of a brief synopsis of their lines of inquiry and what their practice was about?
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Well, Freud was the originator of psychoanalysis as a method and a theory, the talking cure, and ideas principally about sexuality and the unconscious. And so he was born in the mid 19th century in Vienna and then died in London in 1939, having been driven out of Vienna by the Nazis. So he's very much a polarizing figure. Many people see Freud as being a charlatan or the enemy of women. And this is of grossly oversimplified view. In fact, of course, he made many mistakes and went down wrong pathways. And yet I'm convinced that for all of its mistakes and dead ends, psychoanalysis provides unique insights into the power and allure of fashion as well as the hostility that fashion also often faces. Lacan is a very different figure. Lacan is often known as the French Freud, and he revolutionized Freudian psychoanalysis beginning in the 1960s and going right up until his death in the early 1980s. He took ideas principally from the latest intellectual and artistic movements in Paris and incorporated their ethos into what he saw as the psychoanalytic project. So, principally, he was inspired in the 30s by surrealism. So whereas Freud wanted to use rational thought to deconstruct the irrational aspects of the mind, the Surrealists wanted to plunge into the unconscious and revel in, you know, dreams and perversions and fantasies. And Lacan was very much of that ilk. He was introduced to psychoanalysis by Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and he was also, in many ways, an eccentric, a brilliant but eccentric thinker.
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Cassie Zachary
Yes, most definitely. And here in a bit, I think we are going to touch on in more detail the connections between surrealist imagery and fashion, which is one of my favorite topics. But these Freudian and Lacanian viewpoints might provide a lot of framework for the exhibition. But there are so many other practitioners, theorists, scholars, individuals who are working in the realm of psychoanalysis who are also highlighted as well, including Melanie Klein, who worked in this realm of object relations. And I find her work really, really interesting. And you mentioned her. And there's another theorist who went back and kind of summarized her work in the context of shopping, saying, if we are stressed or anxious, we may eat or drink too much or try to fill psychic hunger by buying things. So if this doesn't open up the perfect door for a discussion about shopping, I don't know what does.
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes, Melanie Klein, she was the one who brought up the idea of the pre Oedipal child, the real the infant, in relation to the mother, and how a lot of psychological feelings originate in those early stages. Freud was really interested primarily in adults and looking back at their childhood or in children from 4 or 5 up. Melanie Klein was a child psychoanalyst, and she discovered, developed the idea of the pre Oedipal child, the infant whose close relationship with its mother influenced how it faced the world. And if the mother was reassuring, then you had a certain view of the world. In his published works, 23 volumes of his published works, Freud almost never talks about clothes or fashion. But in his private letters, particularly to his fiance, he talks a lot about how he goes shopping and how he really wants certain clothes. He wants a frock coat, he wants a new necktie, he wants a silver watch. And he feels tremendous longing for these and that they're gonna be transformational objects which will make his life so much better. But he's also very anxious about it, about spending money. And we tend to think of shopping as retail therapy that is going to make you happy. And it does in the short term. He feels a sense of accomplishment. He got the right clothes. He looks right, he looks proper. But also he feels anxiety because he's still not sure that it's enough that no matter if he looks respectable, he's never going to be quite fitting in. And part of that was from being a Jew in an anti Semitic society where the correct clothes were a way of being modern and assimilated. But all of us feel this in some way. And his later follower, Melanie Klein, who was a child psychologist, used the concept of the. You know, the good breast would make you feel full and satisfied, but if you were hungry and longing, if you felt stressed and fragmented and anxious, then you might, you know, drink too much alcohol or eat too much or, or sort of lose yourself in mindless shopping because those things would fill the sense of emptiness inside. This idea that what we look for when we're shopping is related to some lack in ourselves is crucial in psychoanalytic and in wider psychological thought. But people can't always decide on what it is that we are lacking. I mean, it could be many things. It could be the loss of the mother, it could be the loss, loss of other childhood things of importance. Lacan had a very telling idea where he suggested that the object cause of desire, what makes us desire one thing or another, that frock coat or that silver watch is what other people want and admire. So whether you want an Hermes handbag or whether you want to have a girlfriend who is a fashion model, or what you're looking for is something that other people also want and that reassures you that you're on the right path to being and having what other people want.
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Cassie Zachary
Yeah, yeah. And that also parlays right into Forster Vergeland's theory of conspicuous consumption, which preceded that earlier in the 19th century.
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes, well, conspicuous consumption is related to all of this, but it's not the whole picture. Because you might not be desiring an Hermes bag. You, you might be desiring, you know, something else that other people want. Depending on your milieu, it could be conspicuous non consumption. You could be in a punk milieu or where you wanted was a handmade something that you were going to fix from a thrift store that would show how authentic and cool you were.
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Cassie Zachary
Yeah, yeah. And shopping, of course, is also this function of a desire to clothe the body. And I guess in the context of psychoanalysis, we must also position that within this shame of nudity concept. I'm hoping that you can speak to the shame of nudity concept in a Judeo Christian context. And I'm asking this question because many other cultures in societies embracing other religious or spiritual traditions, when colonized in the past, didn't necessarily view nudity as shameful.
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Dr. Valerie Steele
It really depends entirely on how you define nakedness and how you define dress. Certainly colonialists and missionaries would come to other people in the non Western world and they go, how shameless they are. Here they are naked and they're not ashamed. But for the people in those cultures, they were not naked. They had perhaps a penis sheath on or they had body paint on tattoos, things that were a form of self fashioning of dress that they regarded as adequate and that the colonizers and missionaries did not. In fact, very few cultures, if any, accept non fashioned nakedness as acceptable. It has to be fashioned in some way, even if it's through tattoos and tooth filing or body paint and beads. And if you take for example, Bali, a sort of distant, you know, Hindu culture, there too, there was not Judeo Christian shame about nakedness, but there was also shame that the idea that early humans were naked like animals, they were not clothed like the gods. And so a clever woman taught them how to weave and then they were clothed. And then holy man prayed and went to heaven and came back with the messages on how they could dress like the gods. So I think that a sense of shame about the unfashioned body is in fact quite universal and has to do perhaps with something frightening as well as desirable about the naked body, which is not just a Judeo Christian Islamic fear.
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Cassie Zachary
Yes, definitely. And while we're on the topic of Christianity, there's actually a couple of biblical references within the exhibition. And one in particular is directly addressing this Christian concept of modesty. Could you tell us a little bit about this fabulous pair of Moschino swim trunks that are in the show?
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes. Well, as an educated Jew, Freud of course was quite aware of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. And as you'll recall, they were naked first. But when they ate the fruit from the tree of Knowledge of Good and evil, they saw that they were naked and they became ashamed. They. And the connection between sight and shame is very interesting. And Freud, of course, tried to explore the unconscious relationship between dress and nakedness in his account of embarrassing dreams of being naked. And he's like, why should they be naked? Children are not normally naked. They'll happily pull up their little shirt and show you their body and their genitals. But the mother has to teach them to be. That's shameful. You have to cover up. So the Moschino swimsuit is quite wonderful. Richard Martin bought it years ago for the collection of the museum. And it has a fig leaf, sort of the original mythic first Item of clothing? Yes.
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Cassie Zachary
And they are a pair of black trunks, and they have a metallic fig leaf right in the crotch area, intending to cover his nudity, of course. And one of the things that really struck me when I was preparing to speak to you today is that this tension of revealing and concealing the body has really been a driving force in shifting fashionable silhouettes for centuries, if not millennia. So there's this trajectory of women in particular revealing increasing amounts of skin from the late 19th century. And then as we turn into the 20th century, this increasing amount of skin being appropriate is evidenced by a juxtaposition in the exhibition of a late 19th century bustle dress, which is paired next to a 1920s shift dress. Can you tell us a little bit more about this arc of revealing and concealing in terms of quote, unquote, appropriate dress?
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Well, it's not a straight trajectory. It goes back and forth. And we only started with the late 19th century because of Freud's and psychoanalysis. If we went back earlier, we would find other more revealing things at times. But Freud was quite aware that people were repressed in society and that women suffered more repression from society than men. But he said they had a loophole for that in their clothes. It varied, particularly evening wear. You could show more than day wear, for example. It was aestheticized eroticism. But there were only parts of their body that they could show, and then they could also show off their beautiful, fashionable clothes later in the 20s. And the English psychologist and psychoanalyst J.C. flugel pointed out that legs had been revealed in the 1920s. And he developed, he took Freud's idea of the erogenous zones and suggested that the legs were new erogenous zone. Then the popular fashion writer and curator James Laver came up with his very problematic idea of the shifting erogenous zone, where he claimed that it shifted, you know, from the legs to the back and so on in accordance with men's shifting sexual interest, which is wholly false, very misleading, but is still sometimes cited by journalists. Men's sexual desires don't shift that way. The back became highlighted in part because the Hays Code said you couldn't show so much bosom in front, so they switched to the back, which was revealed by the fashionable swimsuits. And then that, because it was shown, became somewhat eroticized, but was not a particularly central part. The thing is, with psychoanalysis, if you frame a piece of naked skin, you're automatically making it special and in a sense, eroticizing it. So it could be, you know, your belly button, it could be One shoulder. With a one shoulder dress, anything that is focused on will get a focus of attention, but it doesn't mean it's become a major erogenous zone. I think that it's quite clear that the skin in general and the eye and the brain are the erogenous zones in particular. Secondary sexual characteristics are emphasized repeatedly. But one interesting theory is that it's not so much a particular part of the body like the legs, but rather the shifting back and forth between. You see it, you don't see it like a striptease. So with the Jennifer Lopez dress or this, the safety pin dress by Gianni Versace, it's that movement back and forth. You see a flash of thigh, it's hidden again. You see a flash of thigh hidden. And that, that is the kind of fetishistic striptease fluctuation which is really what's attracting attention and sort of erotic desire rather than a particular piece of sky.
- [21:28]
Cassie Zachary
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April Callahan
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- [22:09]
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- [24:03]
Cassie Zachary
It goes without saying that this act of revelation goes hand in hand with the act of looking. And for women and some men, that means the male gaze. You quote a contemporary psychoanalyst, Pascal Navarre or Pascal Navarre, I'm not exactly sure how to say their name in saying quote what the look of fashion exposes is simultaneously our vulnerability about being seen and also not being seen.
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes, this is a wonderful quote. It's not referring to the male gaze so much as the internalized, pejorative gaze. What you might call the evil eye. I used when I was young. I used to think that clothes were all about, you know, sexuality and display and gender. But increasingly I've become aware people are also feel quite vulnerable, even if they're not embarrassed by nudity. They have no moral scruples about that, but they can still feel anxious about being seen in the wrong way. I put this in the section about the mirror and the gaze and talk about the mirror stage where if you're seeing the child's first mirror is the mother's gaze is the idea that Winnicott expressed. And if the mother is looking at you with love, she helps install a pair of rose colored glasses so you'll always see yourself as okay, pretty okay, even if other people don't agree. But if she fails to do that, if she's depressed or preoccupied or something, you may constantly be searching for reassurance to be seen, but is fearful. Are you going to be seen with that terrible fashion police look? Are people going to just look through you or look over your shoulder for someone more interesting? You want to be seen, but in a good way. Seen, acknowledged, respected as a person. You don't wanna be seen in one of those bad ways. And so what fashion does is it draws attention to you in a good way. It says, here I am. It makes you visible to a probably indifferent world, but it also provides you with kind of emotional dark glasses that will shield your vulnerabilities from other people's eyes. And this is what's so crucial about it. And some people will do it in a way to call attention to themselves. I mean, Lagerfeld, whose mother, like Schiaparelli's mother, was constantly saying, you're stupid, you're ugly. He was always perfectly and distinctively dressed. He always would draw your eye. But he also also wore dark glasses, literally so that you couldn't see any feelings of vulnerability, which he flatly denied having. So, again, fashion can make you stand out. It can also make you fit in if you're too nervous about standing out. If you're dressed correctly, at least you can fit in. Freud desperately wanted to fit in with those professional men in his soc.
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Cassie Zachary
Well, I'm so glad you brought up Schiaparelli, because this leads me directly to my next question. And if I had to select one fashion designer whose work encapsulates this idea of the desire to be seen, while at the same time of relying on fashion as a form of armor of sorts, it would be Elsa Schiaparelli. And there are more than a few Schiaparelli pieces in the exhibition. They're interspersed throughout various themes. I think there's a couple in the mirrored gaze section. There's, of course, some in the fashion and surrealism section. Could you tell us a little bit more about her work within these contexts?
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Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes. Schiaparelli was a very, very interesting designer and one who continues to inspire contemporary designers today. As I said, she. Her mother said she was ugly. And there's. In her autobiography, you see, that she has real issues with her own appearance and with mirrors. She recalls how putting seeds, flower seeds in her nose and ears to try and make herself more beautiful. She talks about, I don't know, scap. I've only seen her in the mirror. I've only seen her in the mirror. She talks about looking through people. She talks about how you shouldn't get a dress to fit your body, but you should make your body fit the dress. Really problematic. Exactly. And she talks about how once in Berlin, she passes a wall which is mirrored, and she says, finally, a smart woman, meaning a chic, fashionable woman. And her friend goes, heavens, don't you recognize yourself? She couldn't even recognize herself in the Mirror. So she's making, in many ways, mirror clothes that will attract attention, but which will also be in some way hard and bounce it back at you. Like, if you give me the evil eye, I'm bouncing it right back to you. I really wanted to get her mirrored jacket from the Zodiac collection because it suggested to me not only that she had that fragmented body that Lacan saw as being an inevitable fate of looking through the mirror stage, but that also a more hopeful sense that she also could use fashion to make herself and others feel better about themselves, even if it was in a somewhat armored way. She was using the glamour of fashion to weaponize a person's narcissism. So they reinforce that narcissism in the face of hostile gazes. And I think that the Zodiac collection, named after her uncle, who was an astronomer, who, in contrast to her mother, tried to make her feel good about herself. She had a pattern of moles on her face, and her uncle said, oh, that looks like this constellation, you know, So a reinforcing idea. Furthermore, her clothes are not really typically idealizing. They're distinctly strange. And the fact that she and Dali worked so well and so closely together, I think she incorporated a number of ideas from Surrealism about sexual symbolism, for example, dream ideas. So that we have, for example, her little pansy purse, which is in the sexual symbolism section, and we have her gloves, which represent, for me, you know, Freud's talk about. It's not just the libido for looking, it's the libido for touching. The way her beautiful evening suit has a totally phallic silhouette, which she called the wooden soldier silhouette. But it's also covered with elaborate floral motifs embroidered in color. So very feminized on the surface. So in. And then she has a dressing gown which is covered with butterflies, symbol of the psyche. I think that her work is quite inspiring in a way that it shows how designers may be taking their own neuroses as it is their own unhappiness, and try and transforming it into a way of beautifying the world through fashion. And I think, actually that this is fairly common in the world of fashion.
- [31:01]
Cassie Zachary
Yeah. And people always ask me, and I'm sure you get this question quite frequently, too, who is your favorite fashion designer? That's really hard for me to say. But Schiaparelli is always at the tippy top of my list for many of the reasons that you just mentioned. Her work is multi dimensional in so many ways. And she collaborated extensively with the Surrealists, not just with Dali, but also with Jean Cocteau. And a lot of the imagery of the surrealist references back to Freudian dreamwork. So it's all interconnected.
- [31:35]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Oh, yes. Freudian dream interpretation focused initially on the idea that dreams were always about sexual wishes, but those would be concealed because of repression. So they'd come out in symbolic ways. You might dream of phallic symbols, but it would be a top hat, you know, or a high heel, which a gun, a knife, something that was long, hard, stuck up. Or it could be female sexual symbols, which could be vaginal or uterine, which would be purses, pockets, jewel boxes, et cetera. He didn't invent these ideas. These ideas have been around since antiquity. Ancient Rome, ancient India. We have phallic symbols. But as his patient Dora said, when he interpreted one of her dreams as being about female sexual symbolism, she said, I knew you'd say that. Freud himself allegedly even said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But these ideas have become part of our culture and are played with by designers. We have a pair of Chanel shoes with guns as heels. And that, of course, is typical phallic symbolism. I once spoke to a group of engineers about sexual symbolism in fashion, and one of them came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, we call one kind of cell phone a candy bar and recall another kind that folds a clamshell. From what you said, there's something sexual about that. And I said, candy bar, clamshell. Yeah, I would say there's something sexual about that. So we have in the show this wonderful Moschino by Jeremy Scott evening dress, the candy, the Hershey's chocolate bar dress. It's clearly about pleasure principle and about the ideas of oral pleasures and this sort of soft, sweet candy that melts in your mouth. It's transforming in a somewhat sexist but humorous way, the female body into something that's good enough to eat, and it's a candy bar. It's also a phallic symbol. In all these ways. It's denying the reality principle in favor of a fantasy of pleasure and sexuality. Meanwhile, Jung was upset by Freud's emphasis on sex and said, no, no, it's about the collective unconscious and, you know, universal archetypes like the queen or the feminine archetypes. So I show another dress, which is by Rick Owens, about a somewhat more esoteric female archetype, the high priestess. So Freud, though, later realized that not all dreams were even in a disguised way, about pleasure and sexuality. Some of them, especially recurrent nightmares, seem to be about working through some kind of Trauma. And he somewhat borrowed an idea from the young woman psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein about the death instinct. She said that the death instinct goes along with the sexual instinct. And so he proposed Eros versus Thanatos and Certain Clothes by, for example, Josephus Themister created a collection about 2010 called 1915 Opulence and Bloodshed. And it was about World War I, directly related to when Freud came up with his theory. And it was about soldiers who were, at the same time, destroyers and killers and also victims on the front in the war. And then, of course, Yoji Yamamoto, born during World War II in Japan, whose father died during the war, and many of whose clothes reference death. And then, of course, another one by Jun Takahashi of Undercover, which uses both his scary and his pretty imagery, which he likes to conjoin, in this case, razor blades and roses, which I think were not just scary. He's used both before, but could be interpreted as marrying Eros and Thanatos in the way that artists have to often say they have to destroy in order to create.
- [35:31]
Cassie Zachary
Right. And I must say, I love Jun Takahashi's work. Seems like he might be a big fan of fashion history because you see a lot of fashion history references in his work. Okay, we're going to change gears here for a minute because we have to get through some other major points within the exhibition.
- [35:52]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes.
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Cassie Zachary
So far, we have yet to really touch on two major themes, which are gender and sexuality. I think we've talked about sexuality a bit, but I feel like we should definitely discuss Joan Riviera's Masquerade of Womanliness. And this is a really good launching point into these two topics of gender and sexuality. What is Riviera's premise here, and how does it apply to some of the ensembles that are in the exhibition?
- [36:23]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Joan Revere wrote an essay in 1929 called the Masquerade of Womanliness. And she talked about how professional, successful professional women like herself, whether they were psychoanalysts or business women or academics, were confronted with a male world that was often hostile to them. And so when facing that, particularly when speaking in public, which is something. Remember St. Paul said women should never speak in public was something that could arouse male anger. And at those moments, she said, women sometimes would put on the look and behavior of extreme femininity. Not only would they dress in a more feminine way, but they'd flirt and joke and seem to be saying, don't take me seriously. I'm just a girl. You don't need to be threatened by me. And in this way, she said, it's not just a defensive mechanism in a male chauvinist world, but it's something that women really have to face. And she asked herself, you might ask, what's the difference between the masquerade of womanliness and real, essential womanliness? And she says, there is no difference. And this is an idea which would in different ways influence Lacan and Judith Butler. So it's really like the performance of femininity, I think, not just the performance in terms of cultural behavior, but also possibly an emotional performance having to do with anxieties from the point of view of the person performing femininity or performing masculinity. And so this is something that Lacan fault, but only women really had a performance of femininity, that there wasn't really a masculine masquerade. Which is kind of funny because he himself was very dandical and an eccentric dresser, but he thought that it feminized men who dressed in a fancy fashion way. Men have traditionally repressed the idea that they were fashionable, at least in the last couple of centuries. We'll just stay in the modern timeframe, and suggested that it's just something women do. Different analysts have had different takes on this. And I think if you look at something like Jean Paul Gaultier's clothes when he does this menswear, you know, and it's brightly colorful and decorative, and he puts men in skirts, and he violated so many taboos of class and age, but also very much of sex and gender. And you think you look at these and you go, these are not unmarked, you know, hegemonic masculinity. They're not even kind of standard phallic masculinity. It's some kind of a different masculine masquerade. And whereas I think this kind of clothing unnerved a lot of straight men who have a vested interest in presenting a sort of masculine facade, which is not really a marked one. Meanwhile, the idea of women dressing up as women is something which is totally a part of fashion. And we can imagine all kinds of designers who've done various images of women as fairies, women as sex pots, women as vixens, women as cyborgs. And second generation feminists sometimes found some of these looks offensive, particularly some of Mugler's, which were very extreme. Mermaids, cyborgs, insects. But I read a fascinating interview with where Mugler was talking with Linda Nochlin, the feminist art historian, and she's saying, no, no, femininity is a performance. Mugler's women in his Clothes, they're not sexual objects, they're sexual subjects. And the great designer is always creating new disguises for a woman to enact feminine roles. And that's all a performance. And she and Mugler agreed that there could be both masculine and feminine performances. And Mugler said, you know, you don't have to be a man or a woman. He said, nobody wants to put on a better feminine performance than what he called a transvestite, which was the term commonly used then for transgender people. So I was talking about this as I wrote the book with another sort of radical Lacanian theorist, Anoushka Gross, who doesn't agree with, you know, some of the more straight laced Lacanians. And I said, don't you think that Gautier is doing a masculine masquerade? And she said, yes, she did. Lacan opened up a really important window for women and men to think through when he said that it's not about penis envy. He said, neither men nor women have the phallus, but men think they have it. They think their penis is the phallus. This is a mistake, but they think that. And he said, so they think they have it. And women very often will try to become it or to pretend they are it. And in this way, they'll dress up as the object of desire. Men think, I have the thing that's desired already. I don't have to dress up. But of course, as other Lacanians point out, if they didn't have to dress up, they wouldn't be wearing medals and other things that are a way of dressing up. But when that's normative, like a military uniform, it doesn't count. When it's a Gaultier thing and they're playing with it, then it becomes a real masculine masquerade. And Anoushka said, the thing about women in fashion is women hold up the mask and say, don't you think this mask I'm holding up is interesting? And I bet you can't guess what's behind it. Whereas men, when they dress up, they want you to accept, this is me.
- [42:10]
Cassie Zachary
Yeah. So there's a sort of different level of self awareness.
- [42:15]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Exactly, exactly. And someone in a Gaultier outfit is clearly performing. And that is a kind of self awareness foreign.
- [42:35]
Cassie Zachary
That for just a brief moment we can pop back to this idea of women, the penis and the phallus, in the context of fashion and dress. You note in the exhibition that many women were drawn to psychoanalysis because it represented an emancipation of sexuality being separate from reproduction.
- [42:59]
Dr. Valerie Steele
In the 1920s, and 30s, very important moment when a lot of women like Joan Revere were having careers and they were being independent. Everybody had said for years that sexuality is penis and vagina is all about reproduction. And Freud was saying, no sexuality. Humans are not like animals. We don't go into heat and mate. Sexuality is a psychosexuality. And it's all going to depend on the kind of fantasies, of fears and things you go through as you're growing up, what you'll decide you want, whether you are attracted to a man, a woman, a homosexual object, a heterosexual object, whether you're fetishistic, whether you just prefer to masturbate or watch people, all of those are possible results. There are many kinds of pleasure seeking. And so for women who've been forced into this role of wife, mother, that's it. And are still now increasingly being tried to be pushed back into that, it was incredibly liberating for him to say that it's about pleasure and individual pleasure and same for gay people. Although for a long time, because of the horrible homophobia in the American psychoanalytic and psychiatric field, many people decided Freud was the enemy. But initially Freud was in favor of gay emancipation. He said, you know, it's just a variant of sexuality.
- [44:19]
Cassie Zachary
Well, and many of the male designers featured in the exhibition are or were openly homosexual. How did some of these other major theorists, aside from Freud, view homosexuality?
- [44:31]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Well, some, like Krafft ebbing, although they included homosexuals in their case histories, were in favor of changing the laws against homosexuality. So in that respect they were in favor of gay rights. The key figure who, along with Freud, was even more beloved now of gay and trans activists is Magnus Hirschfeld. He also argued that it was perfectly normal and natural to be gay, to be trans, to have a variety of different forms of sexuality. He thought it was innate that you were born that way. And Freud thought nobody's sexuality was innate, that it was always created over the course of your childhood and indeed over the course of your life. But apart from that, the two of them were both in favor of complete freedom. But most of the other psychoanalysts, even the radical ones like Wilhelm Reich, let alone the conservative ones like Abraham, were anti homosexual. So that was really a problem from the beginning. And it's only in recent years that more and more psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are saying the real problem is homophobia and what is causing these different forms of hatred. I think homophobia is not even a strong enough term for hatred of gay people. You know, thinking that gay people should be killed. That transvestites are crazy, that all of the. Whether it's racism or anti Semitism or Islamophobia, all these are different forms of hate. And you have to try and get into the minds of the haters and try and figure out what they're afraid of and what causes this really sick reaction.
- [46:08]
Cassie Zachary
Yeah. And they're not all necessarily individual, separate issues. There's a lot of overlap between these things.
- [46:17]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Indeed. But they all have somewhat different histories and trajectories. There's different forms of hatred.
- [46:22]
Cassie Zachary
So we are nearing the end of our time together today, and I would like to bring up one final point of discussion, which is fetish wear. This is, of course, a big topic. We could really do an entire episode on this alone, or episodes plural. Would you tell us a little bit about Freud's belief, first of all, that all women are clothes fetishists? And I know this is a little bit of a tangential offshoot question, but would you also maybe tell us a bit about the birth of fetish wear proper?
- [46:54]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Yes. Okay. Fetishism as a concept began before our period, at least by the 18th century, with the idea that primitive religious religions in other parts of the world, people worshiped fetishes and magical objects. And then it became, as part of the new psychology and sexology, the idea that people with sexual, quote, unquote, perversions included fetishists who thought that if they had a shoe that would magically allow them to have sexual intercourse with. And then Freud agreed with that for a while. And then a period in 1909, he gave a talk in Vienna where he suggested that if you look around you, it seems that half of the population is fetishes. Women are all clothes fetishes. But what he meant by this was not that it sexually aroused them or that they couldn't, you know, have orgasms without a certain clothing item like a high heel, but rather that women placed a lot of value on clothes. So it's really not quite the same thing. And later he said, no, no, actually, probably only men can be fetishists because it has to do with castration anxiety. And many psychoanalysts still think that it's only men who are really fetishist. They say if women are wearing fetish wear, it's to seduce men. And gay men might wear fetish wear because other men are also fetishizing, whether it's boots or high heels, army boots or high heels, they're fetishizing it. But increasingly, some people have argued that women can be fetishists. Can fetishize, and not just to please men, but there's something else that they're getting out of it. But no one has been able to really define precisely what that is, except that maybe the concept of fetishizing is at the heart of desire for everybody in some sense. But certainly I think that women who buy a lot of high heel shoes are not really interested in a closet full of phallic symbols. The penis is very important for men and boys and it's really urgent for them, but it's not something that's that high on the agenda for most women. There were fetishists throughout history, and we have 18th century fetishists like Restiffe de la Breton, who went around Paris stealing high heeled shoes and masturbating with them and doing all of the normal things. We have in the show a pair of commercially produced fetish boots from about 1895 Europe. And at that point you already have items being produced specially for people who were what you'd call level three or four sexual fetishists. So it wasn't enough just to have the love object wearing regular high heeled boots, but they wanted extreme high heeled boots. So those were produced commercially, but in small amounts. We have others in the collection from the 1930s. What's interesting is that by the 1970s, you start to have regular fashion designers producing clothes that are increasingly fetishistic. And this seems to be as sort of an offshoot of the sexual liberation movement and gay liberation. There's a greater acceptance of a variety of sexualities, including degrees of fetishism as being acceptable in society. So whereas Helmut Newton said, you know, up until then he had to go to specialized fetish stores to get the kind of high heels he wanted to photograph. By the 80s, they were everywhere. Everybody was doing fetishy high heels.
- [50:32]
Cassie Zachary
I think today even that sometimes people don't even notice it because it has become so visually ingrained in fashion and design over the last few decades that people don't even necessarily pick up on some of these fetishistic motifs.
- [50:49]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Of course, it's become quite part of the society of high heeled shoes, leather jackets, you know, all latex is still people probably recognize as being a fetish material. But high heel, certainly not.
- [51:01]
Cassie Zachary
Yeah, so we're going to wrap up here for today very shortly. But I wanted to ask you if you think that there's anything significant that we haven't touched on in terms of the show. And also if you might treat us with a few words about your favorite object or maybe Objects within the exhibition.
- [51:20]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Well, we talked a lot about gazing and the phallus. But another psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieux, talked about the skin ego. And we commonly talk about fashion as a second skin. But his idea that just as the skin holds your body together and protects it, so also does this sort of psychic aspect of your mind help hold you together. This can be applied to clothing as well. And so a cocoon coat might replicate, you know, a mother's hug. Albert Albaz at Lanvin said he wanted his clothes to be like a hug. Or Yohji Yamamoto said his clothes were like armor that would protect you from unwelcome gazes. So we use various kinds of clothing that expresses in some way, but the protective or an armored, a weaponized glamour to protect you and make you, help you face the world. Something that Bill Cunningham always said that fashion was armored to help you face the world. So I think that is an important aspect. And the idea that the self is something that evolves, I think is also quite interesting and important in terms of the growth of non binary fashions and the increasing acceptance of transgender people. The awareness that fashion and sexuality may be more of a spectrum than a binary, I think those are important recent trends in fashion. As for my favorite clothes in the show, I mean, of course I was absolutely obsessed with getting the Schiaparelli, obsessed with getting the Victor and Rolf anger dress with his ugly feelings, and obsessed with getting really some good diors from Galliano's era, from his Freud vs Fetish collection. And of course, we built up a good McQueen collection because McQueen always worked very much on his own emotions and his own sexuality as inspiration for his work. So he's someone that also has been seen as misogynistic, but has also been defended for, in fact, creating an image of women which allowed for frightening aspects as well as nice and pretty aspects.
- [53:31]
Cassie Zachary
Yeah, McQueen, definitely. Valerie, thank you so much. This has been an incredibly enlightening discussion. Again, congratulations on your exhibition. The first of its kind to ever make these intersections between or links between fashion and psychoanalysis. So thank you again and we cannot wait to have you back on Dressed for your next project.
- [53:54]
Dr. Valerie Steele
Thank you.
- [53:55]
April Callahan
Dr. Steele, thank you so much again for joining us and for cracking open the mind behind the designs with this very unique exhibition. And while not out just yet, there is a book that accompanies the exhibition which has been in the making for five years now. It's being released in November and is available for pre order now. Trust listeners. So if you cannot make the exhibition which is up at the Museum at FIT in New York City through January 4, 2026. You can read lots lots more on this cutting edge exploration between fashion and psychoanalysis and we've already teased it Dress Listeners in the last couple weeks, but we are doing New York City Day tours in December. So if you want to come to New York or if you already live in New York, we highly recommend you join us because a tour of this exhibition is definitely a highlight of those days.
- [54:42]
Cassie Zachary
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And we will of course be posting lots of dreamy and desirable images of the garments and accessories in the exhibition on our Instagram this week. And you can find those by searching the hashtag dressed562. That's dressed562 also dressed listeners fun news. We are up for an award.
- [55:02]
April Callahan
Yay.
- [55:02]
Cassie Zachary
We were recently nominated for a Signal Award, which is a podcasting award in the category of Artists and Designers Shaping Culture category. So now that we are nominated, it's up to you to vote until October 9th. We will of course put a link in our bio, but you can also just head over to SignalAward.com to cast your vote for us in the Artists and Designers Shaping Culture category.
- [55:27]
April Callahan
Yes. And of course we could not do this without you all. So thank you so much for your continued support. And I also just wanted to throw out there too that there is still time to sign up for my class what Women the Revolution 1930s through 1960s that starts on October 16th and we will be meeting for four consecutive Sundays to explore the evolution and revolution of women's fashion. I hope that you will consider joining me.
- [55:51]
Cassie Zachary
That does it I think this week for us Dressed listeners, may you consider where your fashion fantasies reside Next time you get dressed, please head to Dressed Underscore podcast on Instagram or REST Podcast without the Underscore on Facebook to check out the visual content associated with each week's episodes.
- [56:11]
April Callahan
And remember, we always love hearing from you, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so@hellorusthistory.com DressedHistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person tours and online fashion history courses and you can check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.
- [56:29]
Cassie Zachary
We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books, so if you are interested you can always find a link in our show Note to our Bookshop Bookshelf. So that address is bookshop.org shop dress and there you can find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles and.
- [56:50]
April Callahan
Do you love dress but want to skip the ads? You can now sign up for ad free listening with any tier on our Dressed History Patreon.
- [56:58]
Cassie Zachary
We are also excited to now be part of the Airwave Network and their Premium Ad free History since subscription Airwave History plus available on Apple Podcasts. The subscription brings dress and also 27 other popular history podcasts ad free for just 5.99 per month. More information on Patreon and Airwave is available at the link in our bio.
- [57:21]
April Callahan
Thank you as always for tuning in and more dressed coming your way very soon. The History of Fashion is a production of dress media.