The New Yorker:

Our garments offer glimpses of the unconscious; we may also choose them because they feel nothing like us—because they allow us, briefly, to become someone else.

By Leslie Jamison

In “Fashion and the Unconscious,” a book from 1953, the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler describes a patient in her mid-thirties who wore so much gray clothing that her friends called her the Lady in Gray. When Bergler asked the woman why she dressed this way, she said simply, “I like it”—the kind of reply that, to a mid-century analyst, dangled like a red flag before a bull. Eventually, Bergler tells us, he excavated the unconscious motive for her gray attire: beginning in her late teens, the woman had spent six years composing music and devising ballets, but she gave up when the work on which she’d pinned her highest hopes—a tragedy about moths attracted to a great, beautiful light, who all end up burned to death—was rejected. Bergler grew convinced that, after her artistic dreams were thwarted, she’d begun to identify as one of these burned moths. “Aren’t moths—gray?” he asks her. He then triumphantly reports, “The patient did not answer.”

One senses that there may have been more to the woman’s silence than awestruck agreement, but Bergler cheerfully adds her to his portfolio of case studies, in which patients’ sartorial peculiarities are unfailingly traced to episodes from their pasts. An artist who always wears red claims to find the color “reassuring,” a feeling that Bergler comes to understand as rooted in an early exposure to Cecil B. DeMille’s film “The Ten Commandments” and its depiction of Moses parting the Red Sea. Another patient has a pattern of sleeping with married men and a penchant for wearing green dresses with gold accessories (or, occasionally, gold dresses with green accessories). Believing the two tendencies to be linked, Bergler diagnoses her with an ongoing rebellion against her mother, a literary critic who wore drab colors and once offered an unsatisfying explanation of a line from Goethe’s “Faust”: “My dear young friend, grey is all theory. The golden tree of life is green!”

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