The Museum at FIT Explores a Century of Fashion Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

Fashion is a language, one that telegraphs our desires and identities. So what happens when that conversation collides with psychoanalysis, the century-old practice of interpreting the unconscious? That question is at the heart of Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, a new exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, organized by museum director and chief curator Dr. Valerie Steele.

The show explores the historical link between fashion and psychoanalysis, from the beginning of the 20th century through today. It’s organized chronologically, giving visitors a brief history lesson starting with the personal style (and controversial but influential ideas) of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, himself. On view through January 4, 2026, Dress, Dreams and Desire features nearly 100 pieces of dress from legendary designers like Alexander McQueen, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gianni and Donatella Versace, John Galliano, Thierry Mugler, Yohji Yamamoto, Azzedine Alaïa, and Vivienne Westwood.

“Fashion was always dismissed as superficial,” Steele tells W over Zoom. “And of course, literally speaking, it is. It sits on the surface of your body. But it’s a deep surface.” Once dubbed “the Freud of fashion” by critic Suzy Menkes, Steele has spent decades making clothes a topic of deep scholastic inquiry, helping to legitimize fashion as worthy of serious study since she wrote her doctoral dissertation on erotic Victorian fashion for her Yale PhD in the mid-1980s. That paper would become her first book, Fashion and Eroticism (she would go on to write or edit dozens more). The Dress, Dreams, and Desire exhibition coincides with Dr. Steele’s newest book of the same name, which will be published in November.

Of this latest project, she says she was “particularly interested in the relationship between fashion, the body, and sexuality,” noting, “you can’t study sexuality and identity without considering psychoanalysis.” That interest dovetails with a wider cultural moment in which young people are embracing psychoanalysis, sparking a revival in the field and a renewed interest in the insights of thinkers like Freud that would have been unheard of even 10 years ago.

To help viewers make sense of the sprawling topic, the show is divided into thematic categories, featuring text, photographs, and paintings alongside the pieces of dress. Titles of each section, such as “The Mirror and the Gaze,” “The Naked Dreamer,” “The Phallic Woman,” and “The Object of Desire,” introduce visitors to the frameworks through which theorists have explored the unconscious for the last 130 years or so—and the way these ideas were reflected in the fashion of the time.

A section referencing French analyst Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage theory, for instance, manifests in an intricately mirrored coat from Schiaparelli’s spring 1939 Zodiac collection. “[For that piece,] I had a private collector who agreed to lend me it. [That was] one of the things I most wanted,” Steele says. “Out of all the complexity of Lacan’s theory, the mirror stage is probably the easiest thing to understand.” (In quick terms, it relates to how an infant’s primary caretaker acts as a mirror during a crucial stage of development.)

“[Elsa] Schiaparelli’s biography is full of references to mirrors,” Steele says. “She talks about how her mother always said she was ugly, and she’s got this very ambivalent body dysmorphia. But I think she also, like a number of designers, uses fashion to heal that.”

Steele spent five years researching for this show and the book. While reading about French analyst Didier Anzieu’s theory of the metaphorical skin-ego—“the ‘second skin’ that reinforces your feelings of confidence and holds you in a way that comforts and protects,” she says—a light bulb went off. “A lot of designers were saying similar things. Yohji Yamamoto said, ‘My clothes are like armor that protects you from evil looks.’ I thought, Wow, that’s exactly what Anzieu is talking about.’”

That kind of pattern recognition that makes both psychology and fashion such engrossing topics to study undergirds the exhibit, and Steele is thrilled to point out some of her favorite bits. Gianni Versace’s signature Medusa symbol, for instance, “is such a fantastic emblem for him to have chosen as his iconic image,” she says, “because it’s an apotropaic image, one that wards off evil. It’s so fabulous to wear something with that on you that will say, ‘Back off. I'm not afraid of all the evil eyes that might freeze me into silence.’”

Steele sees the way fashion stretches the expression of identity as similar to the psychoanalytic theory of the ever-changing self. “One of the ways that we all express that change is through fashioning ourselves,” Steele says. “For young people today, that means you have much more fluid or non-binary dressing, because there is a paradigm shift in attitudes about sexuality and gender. That’s something a lot of older analysts have not caught up with.”

A desire to return to the inward-looking gaze of psychoanalysis—not to mention a cultural explosion of pseudo-therapy-speak—seems in line with a growing trend toward slow, thoughtful, and sustainable fashion. Steele doesn’t shy away from discussing psychoanalysis’s problematic roots, which turned people off from it in the first place, including its history of misogyny, racism, transphobia, and “the grotesque homophobia which dominated psychoanalysis in America from the ’50s through the ’80s.” But like the self—and like fashion—the field is ripe for change.

“I hope people will reject the oversimplistic idea that psychoanalysis is a bad thing,” Steele says. “No theorist is always right—a lot of what Freud and Lacan and the rest of them said was absolutely not true. But there are elements which led us to think in more sophisticated ways about the unconscious forces that play on what we believe and how we act.”