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Women: A Cultural ReviewPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwcr20

Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the SelfEmma WhitingPublished online: 08 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Emma Whiting (2013) Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self, Women: A CulturalReview, 24:2-3, 260-262, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2013.805912

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2013.805912

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The Disruptive Potential ofFashion

IN Fashion and Psychoanalysis, Alison Bancroft suggests that there isa natural convergence between psychoanalysis and its dialogues withcultural forms, and fashion’s emphasis on creativity and aesthetic formover the business of trends, products, branding and retail. By bringingthe two together, fashion is illuminated, in particular the relationshipswith the body, femininity and art that both define it and constitute itsdisruptive potential. Following Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of ModernLife’ (1863), Bancroft distinguishes fashion from dress and the operationof clothes by its place within artistic discourse and modern aestheticpractice: though not art, it can be spoken about in the same terms.She locates the body as key to the operation of fashion which, far froma collection of fixed objects superimposed onto a body, ‘exists onlywhen it is in the process of being worn’ (2), whilst fashion in turnre-inscribes the body. Bancroft also anchors fashion to the feminine,understood through three definitions: pertaining to feminine subjects,pertaining to and contingent on the body and following an impossibleand contradictory logic. Fashion is, she states, ‘a creative form, realisedon the body, that articulates the feminine in innovative and disruptiveways’ (5).

Briefly surveying and criticising previous psychoanalytic approachesto, Bancroft adopts a Lacanian framework to explore fashion’s implica-tions for the ‘wearing, viewing and responding human subject’ (12).Lacan’s tripartite model of an inherently alienated and conflictedsubjectivity, she argues, offers a frame through which to comprehendfashion*itself pervaded by contradictions and operating as a corporealexperience that functions both visually and linguistically*withoutcompromising these paradoxes. From a Lacanian perspective, fashionbecomes a site on which the psychic processes that both constitute andchallenge subjectivity are played out and given expression. It is complicitin processes of identification, desire and language and the negotiationof the alienation, instability, conflict and lack that at the heart of

Alison Bancroft, Fashionand Psychoanalysis:Styling the Self, I. B.Tauris, 2012. £17.99paperback 978 1 78076004 9.

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................................................................................................ ....................................Women: a cultural review Vol. 24. Nos. 2�3.ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2013 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2013.805912

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subjectivity. It is at the point where fashion most clearly manifests itsrelations to art, femininity and the body that it is also ‘at its mostinnovative, provocative and challenging’ (5) and it is in the extremeexamples of fashion found in the one-off ‘show pieces’ that this fulldisruptive potential begins to be realized. As in Lacan’s own deploymentof psychoanalytic discourse upon creative forms such as art and literature,Bancroft stresses that fashion is not the analysand here. Rather, it is read,with art theory and practice (surrealism, the avant-garde and performanceart, for example) in a psychoanalytic frame in order to interpret ‘some ofthe most challenging and recalcitrant fashion objects and images of recenttimes’. (12)

Bancroft focuses on fashion photographers Nick Knight and YohjiYamamoto whose images of corrupted corporeal boundaries, impossiblecontainment and disintegrated subjectivity provoke a troubling, hyster-ical identification with a refusal of the terms of the symbolic contract,with lack and with disorder; and on the couture creations of JohnGalliano and Alexander Macqueen as manifestations of the dual positionof Woman and feminine subjectivity in the symbolic order as both objeta*the lost object that is the cause of male desire*and as impossible andunspeakable subjectivity which, in Macqueen’s designs, offers a site offeminine resistance. She explores Leigh Bowery’s costumes which contortthe body and disguise its features, as not only a ‘queering’ of normativegendered identity but also of ‘existence itself’ (195) and in HusseinChalayan’s designs, locates a ‘radical unintelligibility’ (187) that hints atthe operation of the Lacanian sinthome*the harmonization of languageand the real*which positions Chalayan’s fashion as both acknowl-edgement and acceptance of the impossibilities underpinning our ownexistence.

With only textual description, it is at times difficult to fully appreciatethe unsettling power the pieces hold, either as objects of our gaze oras clothing. Nevertheless, these psychoanalytic frames provide a verypersuasive alternative means of speaking of fashion to that which pervadespopular and political culture where it is perceived most often as amalicious, manipulative influence upon women. For Bancroft, it is not aquestion of the subject being passively over-run by fashion or indeed offashion being commandeered by its wearer, for both models assume thevery myth of subjective unity that Bancroft has shown fashion tochallenge. Rather, by placing fashion in a much wider context of social,cultural and psychic phenomena, Bancroft finds in the relationshipbetween fashion and its wearer not the cause of new psychic crises but,rendered in aesthetic form, the tensions, conflicts and paradoxes alreadyat the heart of subjectivity. And, whilst certainly engaging with what can

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be articulated, it is where fashion engages with what cannot*in particularwith the impossible and contradictory logic of the feminine*that, Bancroftconcludes, its disruptive potential comes into sharp focus, offering a site ofpersonal and political resistance to the myths of normative gendered identityand subjective unity.

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