Fashion meets Freud. A new exhibit explores clothes through a psychoanalytic lens

Fashion and Freud? From top hats to stilettos, bustiers to bullet dresses, what we choose to put on our backs is interpreted through the lens of psychoanalysis in a new exhibit five years in the making.

Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at FIT, curated nearly 100 designer pieces to offer a road map of sorts between fashion and such things as the unconscious mind, the need for armor and the pull of desire.

And she noted during a walk-through of the exhibit a day before Wednesday’s opening that Freud himself was a fashionista, in rigidly conventional English-style suits made of the best materials and tailored to perfection.

While Steele, 69, has never spent time on a psychoanalyst’s couch, she’s been intrigued by the practice’s interplay with fashion for quite some time.

“Ever since I was in graduate school, when I started to focus on the history of fashion, it seemed to me that despite