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Psychoanalysis in Fashion explores the subject of clothes, body ornamentation, and fashion from psychoanalytic, interpersonal, and cultural perspectives. The insights presented highlight the relevance of fashion for investigation in clinical work. Readers who might dismiss this book because of its apparently light, if charming, topic—this is a book about fashion, after all, even the cover a bright collage of fashion illustrations—should reconsider. Psychoanalysis in Fashion approaches the subject of fashion seriously, academically, but not without humor.
The book's editors, Anita Weinreb Katz and Arlene Kramer Richards, one of whom is referred to by a patient as “fashionista analysta” (an alternative title for this book?) have assembled an eclectic array of contributors from the fields of psychoanalysis, fashion, and academia to address a wide selection of issues related to fashion. Topics include shopping compulsions, clothes as fetish, the multiple conscious and unconscious meanings of jewelry, shopping and display, female cross-dressing, and the varied uses and significance of tattoos. Consistent with the aesthetic, visual nature of fashion, illustrations—of tattoos, hairstyles, Chinese handwork, and even the editors' ancestors (dressed to the nines)—embellish, and enhance, the book.
Psychoanalysis in Fashion is divided into seven parts, beginning with personal considerations, musings, by Katz and Richards about their interest in fashion and in writing this book. Both grew up enjoying the experience of shopping and of being “consumers” of fashion (p. 6). Later, as psychoanalysts, their work motivated each to understand the meanings, fantasies, emotions, and significance, conscious and unconscious, of fashion in their patients' lives. As Katz writes, her wish was to learn “how