GREAT STRIDES
Harper's BAZAAR Singapore|January 2024
The psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose explores how women have taken control of the sartorial narrative over the centuries, embracing fashion as a subtle yet powerful form of self-expression
Anouchka Grose
GREAT STRIDES

My first psychotherapist tried to cure me of my interest in fashion. I was in my early twenties and had gone to see him about my morbid fear of the dark. Every week, en route to his Fulham office, I would stop by a dress agency (appropriately named Hang Ups) and pick up second-hand John Galliano and Romeo Gigli pieces, mostly for around £40. On seeing my ever-changing outfits, and my ever-present shopping bag, he took it upon himself to try to persuade me that my interest in clothes was unhealthy.

It was expensive (for an art student) and betrayed a pathological investment in my own image. He suggested that I try wearing the same clothes for a week to see how I felt and to uncover the repressed, unconscious wishes behind my desire to dress up. I hated him so much I dropped my original symptom. I was cured!

Seven years and two more therapists later, I began to train as a psychoanalyst myself. I was struck, during my placement in an NHS psychotherapy clinic, by the fact that most psychiatrists’ reports began with a description of the patient’s clothes.

Were they scruffy? Clean? Conventional? Eccentric? What clues did they give to the person’s inner world? I was also amused and irritated by a passage in the psychoanalyst Nina Coltart’s much-read book How to Survive as a Psychotherapist that advised female therapists to look as boring as possible. Interesting clothes would be too revealing of one’s own narcissism, apparently. Did that really mean I was doomed to dress in tasteful, draped neutrals, perhaps with a chunky statement necklace—the only bit of stylistic pleasure a ‘proper’ therapist was allowed?

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة January 2024 من Harper's BAZAAR Singapore.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة January 2024 من Harper's BAZAAR Singapore.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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