| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is a psychoanalytic engagement with fashion. It follows from established
work in literature, film and visual art, and deploys psychoanalysis, particularly the
work of Jacques Lacan, as a critical theory in order to interpret a particular cultural
form. It departs from other psychoanalytic cultural criticism in that it takes fashion as
the object of study.
Although fashion is not art there are moments where it can be discussed in the same
terms as art, and it is with these moments that this thesis is concerned. The instances
of fashion under discussion are selected from the unusual, innovative, avant garde
fashions that are seen in galleries and museums, in the bi-annual, international
Fashion Week shows, and in photography editorials in fashion magazines. Kristeva’s
notion of the avant garde as a mechanism by which intractable gender conventions
can be critiqued is central to my definition of the feminine in fashion as pertaining to
feminine subjects, usually but not exclusively women, as pertaining to and contingent
upon the body, in particular the female body, and, in a specifically Lacanian idiom, as
following an impossible and contradictory logic. These three definitions of femininity
allow for a reading of fashion that will anchor fashion to the category of the feminine,
while also rejecting any notion of that category as in any way either biologically or
anatomically determined, or reliant on social structures for its resonances and its
meaning.
If psychoanalysis is concerned with what cannot be said, then so is fashion, but
despite the best efforts of both, the unsayable remains precisely that. Fashion is
predicated on leaving contradictions intact, and a psychoanalytic reading of fashion
demonstrates what these contradictions are and how they operate not just as instances
of avant garde creative forms but also, and more importantly, as instances of the
unspeakable impossibility of human subjectivity, writ large on the human body itself. | en_US |
