Psychoanalysis: Dress as a Mirror

At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), the exhibition on display frames viewers’ interpretation before any encounter. Descending the stairwell to the exhibit, walls erupt in oversized scarlet lettering: Dress, Dreams, & Desire: Fashion & Psychoanalysis, as if the building were actively confessing the repressed. The bold, declarative typography, combined with the stairwell’s steepened descent, feels private and interior. The show pushes inward, toward something murky rather than merely a spectacle. By the time you circle down to the gallery floor, it’s clear: fashion is not just a surface. It represents a psyche.

Dress, Dreams, & Desire operates on the radical premise that clothing is not just about expression or a social signal, but rather a psychic apparatus, the socialization of the human unconscious. In this thought experiment, fabric mediates the human fantasy and silhouette disciplines desire, shaping how longing is deferred and displayed. The show contends that long before Sigmund Freud systematized human repression, the body, dressed in garments, was staging it. FIT’s exhibit proposes that fashion is the earliest and most persistent technology by which humans negotiate their exposure, pleasure, and shame.

Opening with a bold, evolutionary provocation, the show contends that humans’ hairlessness, earning us the nickname “naked ape” when compared to our primate counterparts, emerged through sexual selection. The exhibition pounces on the idea that nakedness invites an instinctual, carnal desire, one intolerable from a societal standpoint. Clothing, on the surface, creates a compromise to fulfill this desire within the bounds of social norms. Skin becomes a canvas, and adornment follows. But from tattoos to haute couture, fashionable decoration both amplifies and suppresses erotic attention.

Freud’s writings on dreams of nakedness, featuring the dreaded, recurring nightmares of public exposure, anchor the first section of the exhibit. Freud hypothesized that shame surrounding the body is not necessarily innate, but learned through children being taught to conceal themselves. To Freud, clothing wasn't just about material protection but rather psychic instruction. By teaching the body how to behave in public, clothing transforms human flesh into a social object. Looking, as a result, is never neutral. Freud’s idea of scopophilia, or the pleasure of looking, quietly pumps beneath displays. Desire attaches itself to vision before the eyes can consume themselves with images, and dress sharpens this dynamic through the concealment of the body. 

The show contends that gender adds yet another layer to this economy of desire. Freud’s understanding of female sexuality, historically framed as modest, is communicated through the garments on display, as the exhibition doesn’t shy away from constant pokes and prods at discomfort. By the 1920s, psychoanalysis had escaped the clinic and ruptured popular culture, coinciding with rapid shifts in women’s dress and social roles. For example, at the time, short hair and tailored silhouettes signaled both a stylistic rebellion and a psychic negotiation, as clothing became a sanctuary for femininity to be tested or strategically experimented with. Coco Chanel emerges here not just as a designer, but also as a psychological figure. Her wool dresses from the 1930s read as disciplined and restrained, yet subtly radical. Chanel’s androgyny was structural; she didn’t borrow menswear for simple shock value, but reengineered it into a new feminine identity. Chanel’s clothing emulated the subject she desired to become, a tool to construct her identity rather than expressing it.

In a later section of the display, Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1938 butterfly print dress, a collaboration with Salvador Dalí, electrifies the room. Butterflies scatter across soft fabric like fragments of a dream—delicate, unsettling, and left to interpretation. The exhibition identifies them as symbols of the psyche, but the effect is more unstable than symbolic. Contrary to Freud’s understanding of the unconscious, meant to be decoded, Schiaparelli’s garment is engulfed in irrational, excessive, and unresolved surrealism. Her piece translates psychoanalytic ideas into a visual shock that vibrates throughout the room. The dress feels alive, as though thought itself has arranged its drapes. 

For all its intellectual ambition, the exhibition overexplains itself, often relying on heavy wall texts that, in rare cases, flatten the instability the exhibition strives to explore. Psychoanalysis and fashion thrive on ambiguity and the unexplainable, and, when disrupted by a looming curatorial voice, rush to clarify to absolute certainty, leaving little room for personal interpretation. 

Still, this achievement is incredible. Dress, Dreams, & Desire refuses to treat fashion as secondary to personal identity. Instead, clothing emerges as psychic architecture, shaping bodies before bodies shape clothes, leaving viewers with an uneasy sensation that the dream doesn’t end when you get dressed; it begins there.