Psychoanalysis of fashion

Psychoanalysis and culture

Abstract

Everyone is influenced by fashion, because, as a phenomenon, it is a stronghold of the collective unconscious and appears in the depths of our own psyches, and through the creativity and work of individuals, it finds its embodiment in the endless images that they produce in the form of endless clothes, hairstyles, makeup.

These fashionable images can be analyzed in the following dimensions, where one dimension, like the Y-axis, takes us deeper, crumbling from the whole image to its particular details, showing us literally the atoms of signs and symbols that make up the fashion statement of the image. Another dimension, like the X-axis, leads this set of signs horizontally, like any speech along a chain of words, creating new meanings from statements that come together, woven from atoms of signs and symbols extracted from the previous dimension. At the junction of these two dimensions, the language of fashion is born, the language of the image, the speaking I-image.

This article highlights the topic of what functions fashion performs for the human psyche, how anxiety can be contained through image and fashion, how fashion performs the function of a transitional object for an adult, how fashion hides and reveals the psychic.