Associated Press
[Source : AP News]
Fashion and Freud? From top hats to stilettos, bustiers to bullet dresses, what we choose to put on our backs is interpreted through the lens of psychoanalysis in a new exhibit five years in the making.
Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at FIT, curated nearly 100 designer pieces to offer a road map of sorts between fashion and such things as the unconscious mind, the need for armor and the pull of desire.
And she noted during a walk-through of the exhibit a day before Wednesday’s opening that Freud himself was a fashionista, in rigidly conventional English-style suits made of the best materials and tailored to perfection.
While Steele, 69, has never spent time on a psychoanalyst’s couch, she’s been intrigued by the practice’s interplay with fashion for quite some time.
“Ever since I was in graduate school, when I started to focus on the history of fashion, it seemed to me that despite all of the dead ends and real problems with psychoanalysis, it did provide clues to explaining the power and allure of fashion, as well as the hostility that is addressed to fashion,” she said.
Here are some takeaways from the exhibit, “Dress, Dreams & Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis,” which runs at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s museum from Sept. 10 to Jan. 4. Steele has written a companion book due out in November.
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