Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis by Valerie Steele

Join us for a conversation with Valerie Steele to celebrate her new book, a riveting exploration of how fashion can serve as the lens through which we see ourselves and how others see us. The conversation will be followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

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What can psychoanalysis tell us about the power and allure of fashion? Valerie Steele, author of Dress, Dreams and Desire, was described by critic Suzy Menkes as “the Freud of fashion.” In this pathbreaking book, the first cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis, Steele does not merely hold a mirror up to fashion’s surface, she looks into its soul.
A renowned fashion historian, Steele draws on key psychoanalytic concepts about the body, sexuality, and the unconscious—from the dream theories of Freud and Jung to Lacan’s mirror stage and Anzieu’s skin ego—to interpret the work of designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli, Gianni Versace, and Alexander McQueen. She explores how fashion is the lens through which we see ourselves—and how others see us. Far from being superficial, fashion can be regarded as a “deep surface” that communicates our unconscious desires and anxieties, with none of us fully aware of what we are "saying" with the clothes we wear.

Valerie Steele, an internationally renowned authority on the history of fashion, is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Described in the Washington Post as one of "fashion's brainiest women," she is a prolific author, combining serious scholarship with a rare ability to communicate with the general reader. She is the author of more than a dozen highly acclaimed books including A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, Shoe Obsession, Gothic: Dark Glamour, The Corset: A Cultural History, Fifty Years of Fashion, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, and Women of Fashion: 20th-Century Designers from the Inside Out. She is also editor-in-chief of a three-volume Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion.

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