When you picked out an outfit this morning, did it feel like free will? Was it a series of deliberate choices that made it desirable to venture out into the world wearing said garment? Or was your decision a response to deeper subconscious forces? What if the choices we make about clothes are not our own conscious choices to make?
That’s the premise of a new exhibition in New York. Dress, Dreams and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, at the Fashion Institute of Technology, that makes the case that clothes are the “deep surface”, the “changeable, renewable second skin”, that outside the merely practical act as a facade for far more than we know.
