In an MFIT exhibition, psychoanalysis provides a surprisingly deep look at what we wear
Fashion, it turns out, is a perfect subject for psychoanalysis. Often dismissed as superficial, our clothes reveal unconscious desires, repressed impulses, fragile egos, and various compulsions, including shopping itself. A longtime admirer of analytic theory, Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at FIT, demonstrates all this in the wonderfully brainy Dress, Dreams, and Desire, which runs through January 4. She sat down with Hue to discuss the show. —Alex Joseph
You’ve been working on this exhibition for five years, but I’m hoping you’ll say the idea originally came to you in a dream.
I wish! In a way, I’ve been working on this my whole life. In graduate school I studied with Peter Gay, Freud’s biographer, and used psychoanalysis in my dissertation and my first book. Then in 2012, Suzy Menkes called me “the Freud of fashion,” which was flattering but unnerving—at the time, most Americans considered Freud totally bogus. A few years later I spoke at a London conference co-hosted by the Freud Museum, met brilliant young psychoanalysts, and thought, Maybe it’s time to read Lacan. During the pandemic I finally had time to dive deep and keep going down rabbit holes. This show became my big creative project.
Our culture isn’t exactly one for deep reflection. Why a show about psychoanalysis in 2025?
It wasn’t planned for 2025—it just grew and grew. But there’s been a quiet resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis among younger people, especially in New York and California. So maybe we’re surfing the zeitgeist.
The witty exhibition design—with peepholes and mirrors—feels almost mischievous.
Exactly. Freud wrote about how concealing the body arouses curiosity, so I didn’t want everything on display at once. You wander through, glimpse things through peepholes, encounter projections of the ocean—a symbol of the unconscious—and the night sky, which refers to dreams. Even the electronic soundtrack came out of a pandemic-era YouTube rabbit hole.
Your show reminds us that almost every fashion choice we make is in some way revealing. So what does Freud’s style, and his Knize suits in particular, say about the father of psychoanalysis?
In all his published works, Freud barely mentions clothes—three pages, max. But in his letters to his fiancée, he writes endlessly about shopping, tailors, coats, bills. He never analyzed his own obsession with dress, but clearly clothing was tied to self-image and respectability, especially as a Jewish man in the Habsburg Empire. The English style business suit, and suits in general, was a sign of modernity and assimilation and also part of a whole cult of respectability.
One of my favorite pieces is Schiaparelli’s mirror jacket.
Yes! The mirrors suggest fragility, but also armor. Schiaparelli grew up with a mother who told her she was ugly; her uncle, an astronomer, compared her facial moles to constellations. That Zodiac inspiration shaped the jacket. The mirrors reflect the world back—fragmented, maybe shattered—but also create beauty.
How would you analyze the Gaultier suit with the nude woman printed on it?
It raises the question: how do we come to identify our own gender? Anatomy and socialization play a role, but there’s also an internal sense we grow into. Freud said we’re all fashioning our identities over time. Everyone has to work through gender in their own way—fashion is one of the tools we use to do that.
