Psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose explores how women have embraced 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—a French structuralist re-reading 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 ways. Did people think Tilda Swinton was a less-serious actor thanks to her experimental, gender-fluid wardrobe? Were Zadie Smith’s exuberant, culturally eloquent outfits antithetical to her literary gravitas? And who could argue that Kim Kardashian’s ‘I Love Nerds’ T-shirt was anything other than a tricksy, sophisticated intervention in the cultural discourse on beauty, fame, popularity and intellect? Clothes can clearly be worn cleverly. Why would anyone want to give that up?

This was one of the big questions for me in writing my book, Fashion: a Manifesto. While I continued to insist on my right to dress as I pleased, I could also see that, over the centuries, fashion has been a menace to women, workers, and the environment. To begin to ask questions about the future of fashion, I had to look at its history. I was curious about the moment towards the end of the 18th century when gender differences became more accentuated. Thanks to the combined effects of the French and Industrial Revolutions, men felt the need to signal how serious, hardworking and non-hierarchical they were. No longer was it acceptable to swagger around in a powdered wig with rouge, colourful silks and high heels; indeed, the wearing of lace could lead to death by guillotine. Sombre, functional suits were seen as a better way of demonstrating an individual’s determination to be a hardworking, useful member of society. Still, the means to produce shimmering brocades, diaphanous muslins, and infinite ribbons now existed (namely through the slave trade and the mass exploitation of the poor), so someone needed to keep donning ruffles. Men in suits could run the workshops and factories that produced uncomfortable, ornate clothes, which women wore in order to keep the men in suits busy and wealthy.

One of the many downsides of this system was that fashion could now be used to keep women in a sartorial double-bind. They had to renounce any visual semblance of equality with men at the same time as being directed towards greater competition with one another. They were required simultaneously to put their simpering frivolity and cut-throat ambition on display, to be both ‘less than’ and ‘more than’ in one fell swoop. Perhaps the only upside of this unfortunate trap was that it provided the ideal hothouse conditions for honing stylistic cunning. If clothes were one of the few means by which women were encouraged to express themselves, it seems many of them took this and ran. Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, became something just short of a living artwork, famous for her extraordinary clothing, one day building elaborate miniature sculptures into her hair, the next donning a simple muslin column dress. Her power of influence in fashion soon transformed into actual political influence as she used her elevated social position to recruit young men to the progressive Whig Party. Conversely, the Bluestocking group named themselves after the everyday woollen socks that stood in contrast to the more elegant black-silk stockings expected of a lady, conveying their preference for literature over dressing-up. Meanwhile, over in France, at the infamous bals de victimes, survivors of la Terreur wore simple underclothes accessorised with a red ribbon around the neck to signify the cut of the guillotine. 

In the Edwardian and early-modern eras, as the subjugation of women became less and less tenable, a proliferation of clothing-reform groups with names like ‘the Rational Dress Society’ campaigned for greater sartorial parity. Women’s clothes that were too hot, cold, or complicated, or that applied too much pressure to the body, were discouraged in favour of garments designed for comfort and ease of movement. Visual flashiness was dismissed as one of fashion’s more pernicious mechanisms, marking out wearers as petrified eye candy as opposed to active, sentient agents. Ergo, dressing like a male industrialist was thought to be the rational way forward. 

By 1930, the discourse around fashion was such that the psychoanalyst JC Flügel would propose nudism as the logical next step for humankind. For him, clothing was like a neurotic symptom in that it tried, and failed, to reconcile conflicting tendencies—namely, the incompatible impulses towards modesty and exhibitionism. This manifested itself not just through the artificial division of gender performance between men and women, but also through the divided psyches of individuals who would feel compelled to show off and deflect at the same time. Following the story of Adam and Eve, Flügel linked dress to unhappiness, concluding it had to stop. He also had the improbable idea that women would go naked before men did—perhaps revealing more about his own voyeuristic wishes than about society’s aims and ideals.

Unfortunately for Flügel but fortunately for the rest of us, by 1925 the first Chanel suit had already provided a brilliant resolution to industrial societies’ fiercest fashion conflicts. It was comfortable and androgynous, luxurious yet simple—a radical combination when set against the trussed-up concoctions of previous eras. Still, throughout the 20th century, women’s fashion continued to be a fraught topic. While in the 1920s the short skirt had represented greater political freedom, then again in the 1960s greater sexual freedom, by the 1980s it had all but become a symbol of subjugation—a means by which a woman’s legs could be scrutinised and assessed. In between, we saw bra-burning by second-wave feminists, for whom the abolition of the corset was a drop in the ocean where women’s liberation was concerned. Now, we have social media pile-ons on hyper-sexualised dressing: is it oppressive, emancipatory, or both? 

All of which is to say that, while the overt myth about fashion is that you shouldn’t take it too seriously, the underlying truth is that it’s produced out of a complex collision of historico-political forces, and it is neither inane or trivial to give thought to what you wear. Queen Elizabeth II was a mastermind at dressing entertainingly and sensibly, exuding both wisdom and a sense of joy while conveying subtle but deliberate messages through a canny choice of colour or the clever placing of accessories (such as the circle of yellow flowers on her infamous Brexit hat). Maria Grazia Chiuri’s invocations of feminist artists, revolutionaries, and dancers ring out alongside her capacity for producing clothes that work with women’s bodies rather than against them; a new look so successful that it has contributed to the tripling of Dior’s value in the six years since she took over as creative director. 

At last, it seems, we’ve arrived at a place where fashion can adapt to the needs of the individual wearer. Still, we see traces of the past in two of this year’s biggest trends: stealth-wealth dressing and Barbiecore. In the case of the former, label-free cashmere, muted tones and unfussy silhouettes echo the suiting of the Victorian gentleman—but, now, women have joined the club, replacing blingy logos and high-status handbags with sly sartorial flexes such as head-to-toe Loro Piana, recognisable only to those in the know.

More interestingly, perhaps, Barbiecore—embodied so exuberantly by Margot Robbie in Barbie—mirrors the sophisticated psychic backflips of the 19th-century bourgeois gentlewoman, concomitantly playing the decorous halfwit while bending the world to her will. Victorian novels are full of these wily creatures, manipulating their menfolk while pretending to falter under the weight of their flounces. If the word ‘wit’ describes both intelligence and humour, we could perhaps say that fashion’s most intelligent joke is on the patriarchy. 

This piece originally appeared in the September 2023 print edition of Harper's Bazaar UK