The Psychology of Fashion
Virginia Woolf had portrayed a similar tension between unity and fragmentation a decade earlier, with Mrs. Dalloway gazing at herself in the mirror:
For Steele, much of the sculptural, breathtaking artistry of haute couture finds a way to dramatize the friction between the composed selves we offer the world and the fragmented, chaotic sensation of being alive. We only look coherent; inside, it’s chaos.
As the twentieth century progresses, Steele moves from Christian Dior’s New Look—which brought back feminine opulence in the postwar period, with decadent skirts and cinched waists—to the rise of punk as a style that emphasized abjection, discomfort, and aggression. (Vivienne Westwood called it “confrontation dressing.”) Surveying the eighties, Steele examines the “hard body fashion” of Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier (think Madonna’s cone bra), which she considers alongside the notion of the “phallic woman.” She mentions that, while working on a previous book, “Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power,” she showed a group of analysts a famous photograph by Peter Lindbergh, published in a 1985 issue of French Vogue, of a woman in all black pushing a stroller and smoking a cigarette. As she recalls, “They immediately exclaimed: ‘The phallic mother!’ ”
Throughout, Steele draws on the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s concept of the “skin ego,” which casts skin as both container (“a unifying envelope for the Self”) and communicator (in Steele’s words, “an interface between the self and the world”). It is a useful way to understand clothing—as something simultaneously seen and felt—especially when it comes to the familiar conflict between wearing something because it feels comfortable (the envelope function) and wearing something because it looks good (the interface function). Think of the threshold moment of wriggling free from work clothes, or an evening gown, and pulling on a pair of wash-softened flannel pajamas. Many Gen Z-ers have collapsed the conflict by crafting a style that elevates ease above all—pajamas and pimple patches freely worn in public, promoting an aesthetic that exalts comfort rather than thwarting it. Steele finds an earlier example of this convergence in the French designer Sonia Rykiel, whose elegant knitwear ensembles of the seventies became emblematic of a turn from haute couture to ready-to-wear. “I go to Sonia Rykiel as one goes to a woman, as one goes home,” Hélène Cixous wrote, “dressed to the closest point to myself. Almost in myself.”
Elsa Schiaparelli’s “Hall of Mirrors” evening jacket, from the late thirties. Though tailored in a structured silhouette, it is embroidered with shards of broken glass—evoking both the composed selves we offer the world and the fragmented sensation of being alive.Photograph by Katrina Lawson Johnston / © Francesca Galloway
A look from Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1996 collection, “The Hunger,” featuring a molded corset full of worms. McQueen’s work asks us to confront the ways that awe at beauty can be marbled with disgust.Photograph by Dan Lecca / © Condé Nast
Steele positions Rykiel as an alternative to what Lacan termed “the Procrustean arbitrariness of fashion”—that is, fashion’s often antagonistic relationship to the body. (In ancient Greek myth, the robber Procrustes would torture his victims by making them lie on a bed that fit no one and stretching them or amputating bits of them accordingly.) Certainly, fashion, whether in its haute-couture form or in the standardized sizes of ready-to-wear clothing, frequently feels as if it’s designed for impossible bodies. Steele contrasts two designers of the nineties and two-thousands, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, by looking at their differing relationships to the female form. Galliano’s fashions, she writes, particularly his “body-worshipping, bias-cut evening gowns,” strove to “position the woman who wears them as the object of desire.” McQueen, however, wanted his designs to “provoke fear” and allow the woman to become a figure of terrifying power. His collections, with titles like “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” and “Highland Rape,” not so subtly gestured toward the violence often involved in producing or possessing beauty. His 1996 collection “The Hunger” featured a tailored silver jacket worn over a molded plastic corset that held wriggling masses of dirt-covered worms. McQueen’s work asks us to confront the ways that our awe at beauty can be marbled with disgust. The worm corset—a high-concept art piece that was also stubbornly, horrifyingly corporeal—was a kind of vanitas skull, a reminder of the body as vulnerable flesh even as it becomes the site of surreal artifice.
