摘要：A new exhibition – with contributions from Chanel, McQueen and Galliano – places 100 looks under the psychoanalytic lens, and sugg
‘Fashion exposes people’s desires and anxieties’:
how much do we really reveal when we get dressed?
“时尚暴露了人们的欲望和焦虑”：
我们穿衣打扮究竟暴露了多少？
A new exhibition – with contributions from Chanel, McQueen and Galliano – places 100 looks under the psychoanalytic lens, and suggests that what we wear is the result of a battle in the psyche
一场由香奈儿、麦昆和加利亚诺等设计师参与创作的新展览，以精神分析的视角审视了100套造型，并指出我们的穿着打扮是内心斗争的结果。
Edward Helmore
爱德华·赫尔莫尔
Tue 11 Nov 2025 13.25 GMT
2025年11月11日星期二 13:25 GMT
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?
今天早上你挑选衣服的时候，感觉是出于自由意志吗？是一系列深思熟虑的选择让你想要穿着这件衣服出门吗？还是你的决定是受到更深层次的潜意识力量的影响？如果我们对衣服的选择并非出于我们的意识，那又会怎样呢？
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.
这是纽约一场新展览的前提。这场名为“服装、梦想与欲望：时尚与精神分析”的展览在纽约时装学院举办，它论证了服装是“深层表面”、“可改变、可更新的第二层皮肤”，除了实用性之外，它还掩盖着我们所知的更多东西。
As Dr Valerie Steele, the curator known as “the Freud of fashion”, puts it, fashion “communicates our unconscious desires and anxieties, with none of us fully aware of the messages we send.” From her perspective, “far from being superficial, fashion exposes people’s desires and anxieties like a psychosomatic rash.”
正如被誉为“时尚界的弗洛伊德”的策展人瓦莱丽·斯蒂尔博士所说，时尚“传达了我们无意识的欲望和焦虑，而我们却往往意识不到自己传递的信息。”在她看来，“时尚远非肤浅，它像一种心身皮疹一样，暴露了人们的欲望和焦虑。”
We live in a society where the body needs to be constantly dressed and the outfit becomes part of the skin we inhabit
我们生活在一个身体需要时刻穿着衣物的社会，衣物成为了我们身体的一部分。
For psychoanalysts, fashion has always been a canvas for deeper exploration. Sigmund Freud didn’t discuss clothes in his work, and was fairly buttoned up in his own choices, but in letters to his wife, Martha Bernays, he revealed an opinion that women used “frivolous and fancy dress” to display their bodies, while men exhibited “passive exhibitionism” with hats and coats as stand-ins for male sexuality. Follower Carl Jung argued that clothes act as a psychological “mask”, a compromise that we make between our inner self and the external display we put on to the world. But Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst close to the surrealists, went further. He argued that identity is not conscious freedom: it is formed beneath the surface, in the psyche.
对精神分析学家而言，时尚始终是进行深度探索的画布。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德在其著作中并未探讨服装，他本人在着装选择上也相当保守，但在写给妻子玛莎·伯奈斯的信中，他透露出一种观点：女性运用“轻浮华丽的服饰”来展示自己的身体，而男性则以帽子和外套等“被动的暴露癖”来表现男性性欲。他的追随者卡尔·荣格认为，服装如同心理上的“面具”，是我们内在自我与外在展现于世人面前的形象之间所作出的一种妥协。但与超现实主义密切相关的法国精神分析学家雅克·拉康则更进一步。他认为，身份并非源于意识层面的自由，而是在潜意识深处，在心灵深处形成的。
For Lacanian psychoanalyst Dr Patricia Gherovici, who consulted on the exhibition: “fashion is a way of dressing up the death drive”. As well, she says, as there being “something in making our mortal bodies look a little better.”
拉康派精神分析学家帕特里夏·格罗维奇博士曾为此次展览提供咨询，她认为：“时尚是掩盖死亡本能的一种方式。” 她还表示，“让我们的肉体看起来更美观一些，也具有某种意义。”
This show, which Steele spent five years putting together, places 100 looks under the psychoanalytic lens, from the 19th century to the present. Displays include designs by Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and John Galliano, who designed a “Freud to Fetish” collection for Dior in 2000.
斯蒂尔耗时五年筹备的这场展览，以精神分析的视角审视了从19世纪至今的100套服装。展品包括艾尔莎·夏帕瑞丽、可可·香奈儿、亚历山大·麦昆和约翰·加利亚诺的设计作品，其中加利亚诺曾在2000年为迪奥设计过一个名为“从弗洛伊德到恋物癖”的系列。
“We live in a society where the body needs to be constantly dressed and the outfit becomes part of the skin we inhabit,” says Steele. “The determinations we make come with conscious – and unconscious – intentions that carry enormous transformative power.” In other words, to telegraph to ourselves and others who we are and who we may desire to be; it’s just a primal battle in the psyche playing out.
“我们生活在一个需要时刻穿着打扮的社会，衣服仿佛成了我们身体的一部分，”斯蒂尔说道。“我们做出的决定都带有意识层面和无意识层面的意图，这些意图蕴含着巨大的变革力量。”换句话说，这其实是在向自己和他人传递我们是谁以及我们渴望成为什么样的人的信息；这不过是内心深处一场原始的斗争。
A black Elsa Schiaparelli evening jacket with embroidered rococo hand mirrors
一件黑色 Elsa Schiaparelli 晚礼服外套，饰有洛可可风格的刺绣手镜
Elsa Schiaparelli’s evening jacket has embroidered rococo hand mirrors. Photograph: Katrina Lawson Johnston/© Francesca Galloway
艾尔莎·夏帕瑞丽 (Elsa Schiaparelli) 的晚礼服外套饰有洛可可风格的刺绣手镜。摄影：卡特里娜·劳森·约翰斯顿 (Katrina Lawson Johnston)/© 弗朗西斯卡·加洛韦 (Francesca Galloway)
But the exhibition argues that this analytical approach also comes from the designer, with some actively deploying psychoanalytic curiosity into their clothes. McQueen’s 1998 Joan [of Arc] told the story of the Catholic martyr who was burned at the stake soon after refusing to wear women’s clothes; and 2007’s Witches and Persecution featured dresses referencing the violent ritual of shaving the hair of women found guilty of witchcraft prior to execution. While some have accused him of misogyny – the exhibition notes include a reference to psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler who described gay male fashion designers, such as McQueen, as “women’s bitterest enemies” – Lacanians, according to Steele, “tend to argue his fashions were empowering”.
但展览指出，这种分析方法也源于设计师本人，有些设计师甚至主动将精神分析的好奇心融入到服装设计中。麦昆1998年的“圣女贞德”系列讲述了这位天主教殉道者的故事，她因拒绝穿女装而被处以火刑；而2007年的“女巫与迫害”系列则以剃光被判为女巫的女性在处决前头发的残酷仪式为灵感，设计了一系列服装。尽管有人指责他厌女——展览说明中提到了精神分析学家埃德蒙·伯格勒，他曾将麦昆等男同性恋时装设计师描述为“女性最痛恨的敌人”——但据斯蒂尔所说，拉康学派“倾向于认为他的时装赋予了女性力量”。
Perhaps no designer drank more deeply from the font of psychoanalysis than Elsa Schiaparelli, who was friends with psychoanalysts, including Lacan, as well as psychoanalytically inspired surrealists Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti. For this exhibition, Steele chose an evening jacket with embroidered rococo hand mirrors with fractured faces – Schiaparelli’s designs often used mirrors. It’s no big leap from here to Lacan’s theory of the Mirror Stage, in which a child first begins to recognise itself in the gaze of the mother. “Lacan’s idea is that self-image is based on how other people look at you, starting with your mother,” says Steele. And Schiaparelli was certainly dealing with issues born out of a critical mother’s gaze. “Her mother told her repeatedly that she was ugly.”
或许没有哪位设计师比艾尔莎·夏帕瑞丽更深入地汲取精神分析的养分。她与包括拉康在内的精神分析学家交好，也与受精神分析启发的超现实主义艺术家萨尔瓦多·达利、让·科克托和阿尔贝托·贾科梅蒂为友。在本次展览中，斯蒂尔选择了一件饰有洛可可风格刺绣手镜的晚礼服，镜面绣着破碎的面孔——夏帕瑞丽的设计中经常运用镜子元素。由此不难联想到拉康的“镜像阶段”理论，在这个阶段，儿童首先开始在母亲的凝视中认识自己。“拉康的观点是，自我形象建立在他人如何看待你的基础上，而这首先源于你的母亲，”斯蒂尔说道。夏帕瑞丽无疑也面临着来自母亲严厉目光所带来的问题。“她的母亲反复告诉她，她很丑。”
Interestingly, Steele, until now, has often addressed clothing through the lens of sexuality and gender. “But now,” she says, “I’m much more conscious of how they’re used to conceal vulnerabilities.”
有趣的是，斯蒂尔此前常常从性和性别的角度来探讨服装问题。“但现在，”她说，“我更加意识到服装是如何被用来掩盖脆弱之处的。”
Jenni Dutton’s dress made from hair
珍妮·达顿用头发做的裙子
Multidisciplinary artist Jenni Dutton’s dress made from hair. Photograph: Eileen Costa/© The Museum at FIT
跨领域艺术家珍妮·达顿用头发制作的裙子。摄影：艾琳·科斯塔/©纽约时装学院博物馆
Among the pieces, there’s also a short, reddish-brown dress by multidisciplinary artist Jenni Dutton made from hair, which Steele had created for the show. Hair can be “very freaky for people, especially if it’s in the wrong place,” she says, before offering a psychosexual, Freudian interpretation of the dress’s hypothetical wearer as signalling, by clothing themselves in nothing but hair, that they want, in fact, to be naked. Most people, it’s fair to say, absolutely don’t want to be naked in public, but the question of how much nudity is in fashion at any given moment, how much you or I decide to flash or conceal, has deeper levels to unpack. The rise of nude fashion now, says Steele, may be a response to Ozempic moving the needle back on body positivity, as well as carrying a strong political charge against authoritarianism.
在这些作品中，还有一件由跨界艺术家珍妮·达顿（Jenni Dutton）用头发制成的红棕色短裙，这件裙子是斯蒂尔（Steele）为本次展览创作的。斯蒂尔说，头发“对某些人来说可能非常怪异，尤其是在不合适的地方”。随后，她从性心理和弗洛伊德的角度解读了这件裙子的假想穿着者：穿着这件裙子，只用头发遮体，实际上是在暗示自己想要裸露。公平地说，大多数人绝对不想在公共场合裸露，但任何特定时刻的时尚中裸露的程度，你我决定展现或遮掩多少，这个问题背后有着更深层次的含义。斯蒂尔认为，如今裸色时尚的兴起，或许是对奥森皮克（Ozempic）推动身体积极运动的一种回应，同时也蕴含着强烈的反威权主义政治诉求。
Then there’s a teal-coloured, cinched-waist dress by Anne Fogarty, a US designer from the 1950s, which speaks to mid-century ideas of gender construction but also offers a prism through which to think about the contemporary trad-wife trend. According to Steele, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere “spoke of a feminine masquerade to reassure men they are not really powerful and dangerous,” Steele says.” “When you talk about women masquerading as women you’re really in the realm of fashion,” says Steele.
还有一件出自美国设计师安妮·福格蒂（Anne Fogarty）之手的青绿色束腰连衣裙，这位设计师活跃于20世纪50年代，这件连衣裙体现了20世纪中期的性别建构理念，同时也为我们思考当代传统妻子的潮流提供了一个视角。斯蒂尔指出，精神分析学家琼·里维埃（Joan Riviere）曾谈到女性的“伪装”，目的是为了让男性相信他们并非真正强大而危险。斯蒂尔说：“当你谈论女性伪装成女性时，你实际上就进入了时尚的领域。”
It’s this skill for seeing clothes through the prism of analysts that gives Steele a fresh and intellectual take on current trends – a manifestation of that desire for a changeable new skin, which the exhibition describes as where “unconscious emotions and fantasies take symbolic form”.
正是这种通过分析师的视角来看待服装的技能，让斯蒂尔对当前的潮流有了新鲜而理性的见解——这体现了人们对不断变化的新形象的渴望，展览将其描述为“无意识的情感和幻想以象征形式呈现”。
There’s no discussion of fashion and psychoanalysis that leaves out the phallus. Freud started it with his theories of the oedipal complex and the phallic stage of psychosexual development, but Lacan took it further positing that neither sex possesses it. Steele paraphrases: “Men think their penis is the phallus, and they hope it is, but women embody the phallus.”
任何关于时尚与精神分析的讨论都离不开阳具。弗洛伊德以俄狄浦斯情结和性心理发展中的性器期理论开启了这一讨论，而拉康则更进一步，提出男女两性都不拥有阳具。斯蒂尔对此进行了概括：“男人认为他们的阴茎就是阳具，他们也希望如此，但实际上，女性才是阳具的化身。”
A model wears a long-haired cream fur jacket with big lapels
一位模特身穿一件长毛奶油色皮草外套，外套有宽大的翻领。
‘It makes you feel glam’: shaggy, Studio 54-style coats are partying again
“它让你感觉魅力四射”：蓬松的、Studio 54风格的外套又开始流行了
Nowhere is this more prescient, fashion-wise, than in high heels. It’s not, says Steele, that women opting for stilettos are “collecting phallic symbols, nor is it they’re dressing up in fetish clothes for men. Men may be out there fetishising all over the place, but what are women doing? Every dominatrix I’ve spoken to says they are to show who is in charge.”
从时尚角度来看，高跟鞋最能体现这一点。斯蒂尔说，女性选择细高跟鞋并非“收集阳具象征物，也不是在为男性穿着情趣服饰。男性或许到处都有恋物癖，但女性又在做什么呢？我采访过的每一位女王都说，她们穿高跟鞋是为了展现谁才是主导者。”
Of course all of this – our “renewable second skin” – is always changing, and the problematic nub of our metamorphosing desires is their toll on the environment. Steele says there’s a tension here, which leaves fashion consumers in a psychoanalytic predicament. The desire to shop, or rather to clothe in a metamorphosing second skin is according to Steele, a consumerist embodiment of the sex drive, or Freud’s Eros. But Eros is in conflict with Thanatos, the death drive; in this case the knowledge of the real-world ecological implications of consumerism. It’s hard to say which will win out, Steele acknowledges. Perhaps neither.
当然，这一切——我们这层“可再生第二层皮肤”——总是在不断变化，而我们不断变化的欲望的核心问题在于它们对环境造成的损害。斯蒂尔指出，这里存在一种矛盾，使时尚消费者陷入了一种精神分析式的困境。斯蒂尔认为，购物的欲望，或者更确切地说，是穿上这层不断变化的第二层皮肤的欲望，是性欲（或弗洛伊德所说的爱欲）的消费主义体现。但爱欲与死亡本能（塔纳托斯）相冲突；在这种情况下，死亡本能指的是对消费主义在现实世界中造成的生态影响的认知。斯蒂尔承认，很难说哪一方会胜出。或许两者都不会。
“Many people who love fashion are also feeling hostile to it, in part because they see it as part of the destruction of the Earth,” says Steele. “I’m starting to feel like there’s some huge death drive, with people unwilling or feeling powerless to stop it, but they also want novelty, because a new dress is like a new skin.”
“许多热爱时尚的人也对它抱有敌意，部分原因是他们认为时尚是破坏地球的一部分，”斯蒂尔说。“我开始觉得这其中存在着某种强烈的死亡冲动，人们不愿或无力阻止它，但他们又渴望新鲜感，因为一件新衣服就像换了一层新皮肤。”
If psychoanalysis can help us understand the root of our shopping habit, perhaps it can help us kick it. But we’re still none the wiser how to make sure, once and for all, that we picked our clothes.
如果精神分析能够帮助我们理解购物习惯的根源，或许也能帮助我们戒掉这个习惯。但我们仍然不清楚如何才能彻底确保自己挑选了真正喜欢的衣服。
来源：左右图史
