“Furs, Feathers, Frippery”: Dress and the Sciences of Subjectivity

Abstract

This dissertation is the first history of the “psychology of clothes,” a diffuse but cohesive research project present within psychology since its earliest days. Theorists believed that dress offered privileged access to subjects’ interiority while at the same time—since it was visible on the surface of the body—rendering that interiority in a form amenable to scientific observation. The link between clothing and personality was delineated by researchers in the first half of the twentieth century, namely by sexologists, British psychoanalysts, and American psychologists. Sexologists built a diagnostic category, transvestism, out of the observation that certain individuals had seemingly anomalous relationships with their clothes. Psychoanalysts, meanwhile, theorized about how clothing was implicated in the formation of the self and its relationship to others, constructing concepts that allowed for further research across the mind sciences and beyond. And market researchers investigated how individuals and items interacted, using what they learned to sell goods and to extend the psychology of clothes beyond academic spaces. The spread of these ideas, however, invited critique by cultural commentators lamenting the state of society in the 1960s and 1970s. According to critics’ arguments, the narcissism of consumer culture, and of women in particular, made fashion choices shallow and not worthy of serious study. A particular point of contention for these critics was also the spread of psychoanalysis outside the clinic, and the psychology of clothes presented a convenient lightning rod for these debates. As a result, researchers were no longer able to unproblematically rely on that association for the basis of their science. In this moment of crisis, the field of costume history (and later fashion studies) arose as an acceptable means to continue thinking about dress and identity. Clothing, sitting on the boundary between self and other, also became a screen for the projection of anxieties about identity in the twentieth century. An attention to dress was considered feminine, and this relationship was strongly ambivalent—at times, a connection to clothes was praised and those (namely men) who lacked it were seen as falling short, while at other times women were faulted for investing in the self instead of in others. Some psychologists attempted to challenge this association, but it has remained durable and damning. At the same time, the psychology of clothes was premised on two terms, fashion and psychology, that were seen as only belonging to certain advantaged groups, largely white, wealthy, heterosexual men and women recognizable according to these various binaries. The theoretical foundation for transvestism and for the psychology of clothes more broadly was constructed via the marginalization of others. Those researchers who are today attempting to revive what is now called “fashion psychology” are still contending with these exclusions in their quest to legitimate their discipline. Using archival materials and a range of published primary sources, this dissertation reconstructs what was once a vast and thriving scientific research project into the relationship of the self and clothing. It also explores why this field has since been forgotten and neglected. In so doing, it also asks questions about why certain disciplines are considered “scientific” or “objective,” and how the researchers, subjects, and objects of a field dictate its standing.