narcissus in latex

the erotic spectacle of FIT's Fashion and Psychoanalysis exhibition

There’s a new free-of-charge journey into symbolism, fetishism, and fashion drawing hungry eyes at the border of Chelsea and Flatiron: FIT’s Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis.

Curated by museum Director Valerie Steele, the exhibition features almost 100 items of dress from iconic designers. Steele’s appearance on Nymphet Alumni is a great introduction to the high points of the exhibition, and offers a deeper dive into her work in curation and her relationship with the work of Freud. If you can, go in the exhibition blind, and listen to the episode after your walk-through.

I arrive at 3pm on a Saturday, jogging down the interior stairwell into a quiet, dim basement. The introductory gallery sketches the world and work of Sigmund Freud before clipping through the evolution of psychoanalysis into the 20th century. The main gallery is more dreamlike: a maze of dark, matte corridors twisting and turning towards spotlighted marvels of fashion, creating the sensation of wandering the shadowy hallways of the mind.

Despite how gloriously close you can get to the clearly-lit garments to observe every stitch, the exhibition casts a vaseline lens spell. Things always get hazy when Freud and sex enter the conversation, but that haze can give permission to greater intimacy even in small talk, and so I took a took great pleasure in eavesdropping on the crowd.

A pair of museumgoers passionately discussing the Galliano for Dior 2000 “Freud or Fetish” runway show.

Two men delightedly debate in Spanish about Dior in, a trio of fashion students grin at eighteenth century corsets, and a pair women peer at a pair of Lanvin trompe l’oliel illusion heels, which feature a false flesh-colored “leg” built into a black stiletto.

“Like Mary Janes! How cute,” one of them coos. She tosses a wary glance at the item exibited beside the shoes. “I don’t like the medusa bag, though. It’s kind of scary.”

The medusa bag in question, is of course, a bright red Versace evening bag from 1991, emblazoned with a gold relief of their iconic Medusa logo.

Compared to many other items on display, the bag is markedly tame. Or perhaps, I've become so accustomed to seeing the high fashion logo everywhere that she’s lost the arresting potency Gianni Versace hoped to capture by immortalizing her face.

I linger with her for a moment, trying to hold her gaze.

It makes me feel a little naked, to be looked at so directly. A little like I am subject to whatever this Gorgon desires from me, and a little like I might be tempted to do whatever and exactly she wishes.

Medusa evening bag, 1991, Versace.

Much of this exhibition, as well as much of psychoanalytic theory around sex, is preoccupied with looking and being looked at. Women’s wasp-waisted Victorian gowns are displayed beside a pair of opera glasses, through which, the placard narrates, theatergoers could get a better look at not only the show, but at other audience members. It’s theatre within theatre, women putting on gowns to look at actors donning costumes while men dressed in respectable suits sneak peeks at those very women, who in turn observe their voyeurs.

Eroticism is often at its most powerful when it is indirect. Like Moses hidden in a cliffside, permitted only to look upon the divine’s afterglow as it passes him by but never its true face, we often cannot gaze directly into the eyes of what it is we long for. Not without being burned in some way. And in just the same way a body can — and often does — feel even more erotically charged when it is provocatively dressed instead of totally naked, desire thrives in denial and obfuscation.

Materiality and fantasy are not each other’s opposite, but each other’s fuel.

The most impactful element of this exhibition is, for me, the mirrored boxes in which fetish objects are displayed at roughly eye-height. I draw close to marvel at a pair of ultra-high antique heels only to see my own face — breathlessly delighted by beauty, flushed with sexual interest, alight with intellectual curiosity — staring back at me.

For one moment, before my brain fully calibrates, I am both autonomous subject and eroticized object, peeping Thomasina and spotlit showgirl. The mirror confronts me with the naked hunger of my own looking, and the preening pleasure that flits across my face when I realize I am also being looked at.

Antique bespoke fetish heels

The same magic trick is pulled by a another mirrored box in which gloved mannequin hands reach out of as though aching for embrace. The fetishist’s gaze is more familiar to me here: gloves feature in some of my earliest cinematic sexual awakenings. From the Phantom welcoming Christine into his mirror world with a black leather-clad touch, to the anonymous “helping hands” which slow Sarah’s fall with greedy, grasping grips on her body in Labyrinth, to the dark shadow self clad in body-hugging, head-to-toe black who seduces Lily in Legend. Gloves have always excited me.

At the fetish heel box, I thought about the discomfort I would have to endure in order to have a kind of sexual power over a specific kind of man by wearing those shoes. At the glove box, I revel in the warm recognition and erotic kinship kindled within me.

To put it more simply: the shoes interest me, but the gloves turn me on.

You know what it’s like to feel turned on, don’t you? How it’s so much more than, and sometimes wholly different from, being aroused? It’s that whole body sense of awakeness. A crackle of electricity up your spine or a purring hum in the base of your belly or a pleasant tingle across the skin. It’s a sharpening of presence, carnal as well as intellectual.