The Freud of Fashion

Legendary Scholar And Museum at FIT Director Valerie Steele on Why Studying What We Wear Means Studying Who We Are

In my personal eyes, Valerie Steele has been fashion’s most subversive scholar, the one insisting on dragging a discipline often dismissed as frivolous into the serious intellectual zeitgeist spotlight- whether conservative academia liked it or not. She was, or rather, her books, the reason I started caring about fashion as something worth thinking about seriously.

While her peers studied the so-called “important” topics, she saw something they couldn’t: that fashion, intimately tied to the body and psyche, reveals the hard, hidden truths about identity, desire, and power that conventional scholarship dared not touch.

Now, as director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT, with a Yale PhD and a career spent legitimizing fashion studies often against institutional resistance, Steele has the same creative energy to reveal fashion’s secrets—most recently exploring the unconscious forces that shape how we dress in Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis at the Museum at FIT in New York.

In this conversation, she discusses her journey from unemployable graduate student to the woman Suzie Menkes dubbed “the Freud of fashion,” why studying fashion through a psychoanalytic lens reveals our collective psyche, and why, after all these years, she’s still not bored.

First of all, I would really love to know how you started being interested in fashion.

I’ve been interested in fashion since I was a child. I wanted to be an actress when I was young, and I was interested in vintage clothes—I was part of that movement. I never thought I would work in fashion, but friends from college would always comment that I was the only person wearing high heels.

It was only when I was in graduate school studying modern European cultural and intellectual history that I had this epiphany: fashion was part of culture, and I could do fashion history. Of course, it ended up making me unemployable for more than a decade. I never got a tenured position as professor at a university. But that was a real moment when I realized I could look at fashion that way as a scholar.

Fashion has been a field that’s academically legitimized only recently, and there’s this conversation about how difficult it is to actually make people understand that it’s not something frivolous.

That was definitely the case. When I was in graduate school, a very famous intellectual historian asked me what my dissertation was on. I said, “Fashion.” And he said, “Oh, German or Italian?” I thought, what is he talking about? There’s no German fashion. Then, all of a sudden, I realized. I said, “No, fashion like Paris, not fascism.” And he just said, “Oh,” and walked away. There was nothing more to say to someone working on such a frivolous topic.

Yet, what made you persist? What’s in fashion that you find so important?

It was clear to me that fashion was very important because of the way it was connected with the body, and therefore with the self. From the very beginning, that seemed really clear to me. That was also one of the things that attracted me to psychoanalysis, and what I found in my research reinforced things I had already felt decades ago when I first started studying fashion.

Freud talked about the ego as first and foremost the bodily ego—you sense it on the surface of the body—and then Lacan on the self-image through the mirror stage, Anzieu on the awareness of the skin ego, the sense of the boundaries of the body, and the identity of the body. Not that you are your body, but you are an embodied self, and that’s something which evolves over time and changes.

That ties up with the recent exhibition you curated, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis at the Museum at FIT in New York.

Yes, very much so.

Can you tell me about the concept and the overall idea?

Back in 2012, Suzie Menkes did an article where she called me the Freud of fashion. She had been following my shows, and she thought exhibitions like The Corset: Fashioning the Body, Love and War: The Weaponized Woman, and Gothic Dark Glamour all drew on psychoanalytic ideas. At the time, I found it flattering but also a little unnerving, because Freud was really quite hated in the United States then. Most people thought Freud was the enemy of feminists, the enemy of sexual minorities.

A few years later, I was asked to speak at a conference that the London College of Fashion organized in conjunction with the Freud Museum in London. I gave a talk about some of Freud’s ideas about the libido for looking and how those might be useful for studying fashion. Anouchka Grose, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, spoke there. I thought, this is interesting, maybe I should read a little Lacan.

I started reading that, and then eventually finding other psychoanalysts, seeing that, particularly in France, there were beginning to be more people talking about fashion and psychoanalysis. At the time of the pandemic, I started working on it, thinking maybe I could do an exhibition about this. But I wanted to do a whole book myself, so it ended up taking a very long time. I postponed the exhibition and then finally pulled it together to do both the exhibition and the book. It’s out now.

I’m thinking about fashion’s relationship with psychoanalysis. Does it have to do with the definition of the self as Freud divided it into conscious and subconscious? Are we consciously making fashion choices? Is there another level of reading what we wear?

Yes. Some aspects of our dressed appearance are conscious—if you’re going to a job interview, you know to wear a neatly pressed suit. But there are so many ways in which our unconscious emotions influence our conscious thoughts and behavior, which is something Freud emphasized from the beginning. It’s very hard for people to understand because you think, if it’s my emotions, why don’t I know what they are? Yet very often we’ll feel something and it’ll be unacceptable, so we’ll project it onto someone else or repress the idea that we don’t want to think about.

Sometimes our clothes can reveal unconscious anxieties or unconscious desires that we might not want other people to notice. Freud emphasized that you couldn’t split the mind and body—they were connected. Some neuroses would appear as somatic symptoms: a nervous cough, for example, or a psychosomatic rash. But if you consider clothing like a second skin, I’m suggesting that the sartorial equivalent of a psychosomatic rash could appear through your clothes, that you could show something with your clothes that you didn’t want to.

Since you’ve been instrumental in creating this whole idea that fashion can be a valid academic topic to explore, how do you see this evolving? Now that we have social media, everyone can have a hot take on fashion, everyone’s a critic.

I think those are two separate things. You have the world in which people perceive fashion through a popular lens. Whether that’s through social media or through reading Vogue circa 1960, it’s still just ways of exchanging fairly conventional ideas and opinions about fashion.

Studying fashion as an academic topic means trying to develop hypotheses and test them by seeing what kind of evidence you have. It’s quite different from the commercial or opinion-based ideas about fashion that circulate in the popular realm.

Most scholarship on fashion has addressed it from sociological, historical, or aesthetic perspectives. But the psychological aspects of fashion have been relatively ignored. Recently, there have been some discussions of the psychology of fashion, usually in terms of the psychology of shopping or color theory—which is huge and often problematic. Also, ideas about how the fashion media might make you feel even more insecure about your own body.

The psychology of fashion exists, but it rarely deals with unconscious aspects. A lot of psychology is very behaviorist. I think that looking at it through a psychoanalytic lens provides another, more profound way of approaching fashion. Especially if you put it together with the socio-historical aspects of fashion. Although there are psychological aspects of fashion, we don’t exist in a vacuum as isolated individuals. We are social beings in a family, in a world and a culture where we’re getting all kinds of messages about fashion.

Do you follow modern, current fashion developments? Do you check shows? Do you read reviews?

Of course.

With a Yale PhD and decades of scholarship, what aspect of fashion still surprises or fascinates you?

The past 10 or 15-year trend for more gender-blending or non-binary dressing for young people, and particularly for male-identifying people, is very interesting. Women have been borrowing from men’s wardrobes for centuries. Men have only occasionally done the reverse .

It was fascinating to see how, over the past few decades, men started to wear earrings, for example. That was really taboo in the ‘70s, but the fact that certain very masculine sports figures were wearing earrings made men suddenly get in touch with their inner pirate. It’s not feminine. Pirates wore earrings. Men can wear jewelry.

Now, particularly since Alessandro Michele’s reign at Gucci, when he started bringing lots of pussy-bow blouses and floral suits into menswear, it seemed to indicate that, especially for younger people, non-binary dressing seemed more normal. I think that reflected a greater acceptance of the idea that sexuality and gender are not just binaries, but more like a continuum or something fluid.

In that respect, young fashion people, people in the fashion world, are in many ways more progressive than a lot of psychoanalysts. Although psychoanalysts no longer say that women have penis envy, and they don’t say that homosexuals are perverts, they often feel free to say that transgender people need to get in touch with reality—that they can’t change their sex. More conservative psychoanalysts even say that transgender people are psychotic.

You do have progressive psychoanalysts who point out that, just like the body, the self is not some essential thing that never changes. In fact, it changes over the course of everybody’s lives. We all have to deal with our gender, our sexuality, our mortality.

I always like that expression, Simone de Beauvoir used--she was referring to biological women, but I think it refers to everyone. She said, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” It’s the same with a trans woman, or a trans man, or a man. You become who you are partly through the stories you tell yourself, which reflect stories that are told around you—I’m a boy, boys don’t cry, or whatever the story is. And through your clothes.

Particularly in adolescence, you start to experiment a lot with clothes. But I see it even with my grandson, who’s four. He dresses up as spiderman and also as Ghosty, who’s a female character in the Spider-Man series. Everybody is potentially both male and female. Being a boy is obviously more than genitalia, it’s more than chromosomes or hormones.

What’s your social media diet?

My social media diet mostly involves cruising around on Instagram. Seeing what’s up there, what kind of new things are there. It’s a total time suck. I’ll go home and lie down and get ready to have dinner, and then I’m sort of scrolling along mindlessly, and then all of a sudden three hours have passed. It’s terrible.

But that’s the fun of it—getting lost in things you wouldn’t normally have exposure to. For me, I live in Athens, Greece. There are so many things I don’t have access to right now, like New York exhibitions. But I can have an idea of what’s happening.

Yes, that’s the really good part. You can see what other people are doing who interest you, and the kind of things they’re seeing. That’s the good part. But I don’t like having algorithms dictating which of my friends’ things I see automatically.

I know there’s a book out, but do you have something like a plan, something scheduled that you have in mind, or are you fully into the exhibition you’re in right now?

My exhibition will close on January 4th. I have a project that I want to work on for a future exhibition on fashioning the witch, on the image of witches. But that won’t be for a couple of years. I want to do some research. I don’t want to write the whole book. I’ll write an introductory essay, and then I’ll bring in real witchcraft experts of different kinds to write essays. We’ll have to see if I can find enough clothing that is relevant to that.

In the meantime, I’m going to Singapore in January to a conference on the global south, and I’m also talking about creating inclusive fashion exhibitions--ones that are not Euro-Centric. I’m running a museum, so I’m also supervising staff, fund-raising, other exhibitions, and acquisitions. We’re having various meetings about future exhibitions that are coming up in the spring and next fall that other younger curators are doing.

I’m very excited to see this idea with witchcraft, because it does have a very interesting dress aspect. Medieval imagery comes to mind.

Yes. It’s interesting—there are so many recent studies proposing that it was really a kind of femicide, since about 80% of the witches were women. Many of the things they were executed for were not regarded as bad if they were being done by male sorcerers—certain kinds of alchemical magic, etc. We’ll see. But the subject, I think, is interesting.

In the meantime, one of The Museum at FIT’s curators is doing a show on art and fashion, and another is doing a show about doll dressing. Dolls as fashion figures, and also how fashion designers like Viktor & Rolf and Martin Margiela were inspired by dolls.

I never stopped getting interested in fashion. A lot of my friends in graduate school got tired of their subjects, because their focus had to be so small topics, that hadn’t been done before. But there’s still such a wide field open in fashion. Fashion never ends.