The psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose explores how women have taken control of the sartorial narrative over the centuries, embracing fashion as a subtle yet powerful form of self-expression
MY FIRST PSYCHOTHERAPIST TRIED TO CURE me of my interest in fashion. I was in my early twenties and had gone to see him about my morbid fear of the dark. Every week, en route to his Fulham office, I would stop by a dress agency (appropriately named Hang Ups) and pick up second-hand John Galliano and Romeo Gigli pieces, mostly for around £40. On seeing my ever-changing outfits, and my ever-present shopping bag, he took it upon himself to try to persuade me that my interest in clothes was unhealthy. It was expensive (for an art student) and betrayed a pathological investment in my own image. He suggested that I try wearing the same clothes for a week to see how I felt and to uncover the repressed, unconscious wishes behind my desire to dress up. I hated him so much I dropped my original symptom. I was cured!
Seven years and two more therapists later, I began to train as a psychoanalyst myself. I was struck, during my placement in an NHS psychotherapy clinic, by the fact that most psychiatrists’ reports began with a description of the patient’s clothes. Were they scruffy? Clean? Conventional?
Eccentric? What clues did they give to the person’s inner world? I was also amused and irritated by a passage in the psychoanalyst Nina Coltart’s much-read book How to Survive as a Psychotherapist that advised female therapists to look as boring as possible. Interesting clothes would be too revealing of one’s own narcissism, apparently. Did that really mean I was doomed to dress in tasteful, draped neutrals, perhaps with a chunky statement necklace – the only bit of stylistic pleasure a ‘proper’ therapist was allowed?
Thankfully, I had chosen to train in the Lacanian tradition – aFrench structuralist rereading of Sigmund Freud – whose main selling point, for me, was a rejection of normativity. We weren’t trying to persuade our patients to conform to social strictures; nor did we have to ourselves. Instead of submitting myself to shrink cosplay, I could keep wearing the clothes I actually liked.
Still, I was left with plenty of questions about the meaning of clothes: why do we wear what we wear? What is it about fashion that incites both so much devotion and such disapproval? Certainly, the message I had received from my original therapist – had he, too, read Nina Coltart? – was that a sane, serious person wouldn’t dress flamboyantly. Yet all around me I saw evidence to suggest that people, especially women, used clothes to interpret culture, send clever messages and generally indicate intelligence in myriad impressive w
