The Analyst's New Clothes: Reading J.C. Flügel into Fashioning Masculinities: Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear,  Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 19 March to 6 November 2022

J.C. Flügel's 1930 book The Psychology of Clothes ranks among the most delightful and idiosyncratic of psychoanalytic texts (Flügel, 1930). A staple of the literature in fashion studies, it has been largely overlooked and even forgotten within the analytic tradition. This may be because Flügel's argument - in short, that men had collectively, since the late eighteenth-century revolutionary moment, ceded to women the pleasures of ornamentation and display that they themselves had enjoyed since the fall of Rome, abjuring the psychological gratifications of narcissistic display and adopting instead a drab uniformity in dress - was too out of step with his contemporaries' morally tinged condemnations of clothing as frivolous. Reviewing the book a year after its publication, the analyst Roger Money-Kyrle certainly thought so, commending Flügel for exposing the ‘vanities and anxieties of dress’ as irrational and anticipating a future in which clothing would be largely irrelevant (Money-Kyrle, 1931, p. 101). Irrational they may have been, but to Flügel these anxieties were not so easily dismissed. Rather, they were sites of pleasure too readily relinquished. That man had ‘abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful,’ settling instead, in the present day, for ‘being only useful,’ was to Flügel a self-imposed tragedy of renunciation, not a cause for celebration (Flügel, 1930, p. 111).

Luckily for us, these vanities - largely shorn of any attendant anxieties - were on gorgeous display in Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London, open from