What does fashion reveal about the unconscious?

Fashion is often discussed in terms of trends, taste, or self-expression. But beneath silhouettes, fabrics, and styling choices lies something less visible: the unconscious. Designers do not create in a vacuum. Their work is shaped by memory, fantasy, fear, desire, and unresolved internal narratives, many of which surface visually before they are ever articulated in words.

Across fashion history, some of the most influential designers have produced work that reads less like decoration and more like psychological confession. From personal trauma to psychoanalytic theory, clothing has repeatedly served as a stage where the unconscious takes form.

Coco Chanel: Dressing the self she imagined

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s designs are often associated with liberation, freeing women from corsets and decorative excess. Yet beneath this aesthetic shift lies a deeply personal psychological story. Abandoned at a young age by her father and raised in an orphanage, Chanel grew up within a rigid, hierarchical environment that offered little emotional security.

In a letter to Salvador Dalí, Chanel once wrote that she “always dressed like the strong independent male she had dreamed of being.” Her tailoring, sharp lines, and rejection of overt femininity can be read as more than modernist innovation. They function as a symbolic identification with strength, authority, and autonomy, qualities she associated with masculinity in a world that denied her stability and protection.

Through fashion, Chanel constructed an identity that compensated for early abandonment. Her clothes did not simply reflect a new woman; they performed an unconscious desire to become someone invulnerable, self-possessed, and untouchable.

John Galliano: Fantasy, trauma, and the unconscious stage

If Chanel’s unconscious emerged through restraint, John Galliano’s surfaced through excess. His 2000 collection “Freud or Fetish” explicitly drew on psychoanalytic themes, presenting a series of highly stylised looks that evoked repression, hysteria, and obsession.

The collection blurred the line between desire and discomfort. Corsetry, exaggerated silhouettes, veiling, and theatrical styling transformed the runway into a psychological theatre, less about wearability and more about exposure. Galliano’s work unsettled. Fantasies and nightmares coexisted, mirroring Freud’s understanding of the unconscious as a space where taboo impulses and unresolved conflicts reside.

In “Freud or Fetish”, fashion became a visual language for the psyche itself. The garments operated as manifestations of inner tension, staging what is usually hidden: obsession, fragmentation, and the instability of identity.

Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion and the fragmented self

Elsa Schiaparelli’s work has long existed at the intersection of fashion, art, and psychology. Her “Hall of Mirrors” jacket, designed a few years after Jacques Lacan introduced his theory of the “mirror stage,” offers a striking parallel to psychoanalytic thought.

Lacan argued that identity forms when a child first recognises their reflection, producing both a sense of self and a fundamental misrecognition. The self, in this framework, is always partially constructed, fractured, and mediated through images.

Schiaparelli’s mirrored surfaces literalise this idea. The jacket reflects the wearer back to themselves, and to others, fragmenting the body into multiple images. Rather than presenting clothing as a stable extension of identity, the design suggests instability, repetition, and self-observation. Fashion here becomes a psychological device, forcing the wearer into an ongoing encounter with their own image.

When Clothes Speak Before Words

These three designers demonstrate that fashion is rarely just about aesthetics. Chanel’s tailoring, Galliano’s theatrical excess, and Schiaparelli’s surreal constructions all reveal how clothing can give form to inner life, often before it is consciously understood.

Fashion, in this sense, functions like a dream: symbolic, layered, and emotionally charged. It externalises what cannot always be spoken, turning fabric into narrative and the body into a site of psychological expression. To look closely at fashion is to trace the unconscious forces shaping how we present ourselves to the world and, in doing so, how we attempt to resolve who we are.