Seam of Consciousness

In 1925, Virginia Woolf was photographed for Vogue in a studio built by a man who wanted to marry her mother. Reflecting on the experience in her diary, she jotted down some scattered thoughts, assigning names to tricky frames of mind, among them “frock consciousness” and the attendant discomfort of being a writer in a room of fashion photographers and editors. The feeling of alienation, being “outside the envelope,” as she described it, produced a split in her psyche through which her own desire to belong could unspool. In styling her thoughts around fashion, it’s as though Woolf could give her uncertainty form, try it on, and find some self-assurance, some enjoyment. Woolf’s frock consciousness must have been gathering because a month later, in a digression from an entry otherwise concerned with literature, she wrote, “My love of clothes interests me profoundly: only it is not love; & what it is I must discover.”

In my early twenties, as I was attempting to reform myself from a clotheshorse into someone with more discernment, consciousness was the antidote to my consumerism. That the words “frock” and “consciousness” could be joined in a compound noun—and by a writer of such stature—was as alluring to me as a new silk dress. I was struck by the way it made one of my frivolous pursuits seem meaningful. It was the flip side to the time my well-dressed aunt excitedly picked up her friend’s copy of E. B. White and William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style, only to put it down when she realized it was about prose. We want to make ourselves legible through some style; either way, there is pleasure in the permission earned by deep thought.

While Woolf never explicitly expanded on frock consciousness outside of her diary, it became a locus for readers to summarize her recurring interest in and ambivalence towards fashion. Beyond that, the coinage has inspired fashion writing that is less about clothes and more about the experience of wearing them. Rather than a runway recap, a designer profile, or even a sociological study of hemlines, it’s what happens when the designs of the day are expressed individually and, hanging awkwardly or elegantly, can’t help but reveal or obscure character, to oneself and to the world. Frock consciousness tends to bubble up in moments of insecurity, as more of a self-consciousness, like when, during pandemic lockdown, many wondered what it meant to get dressed only for yourself and moreover, what it meant to get dressed at all. A practice understood to communicate personal identity requires knowing what that identity is and who you’re communicating to. The unease that frock consciousness can elicit hints that there is something about ourselves that is always out of reach to us: ungovernable desires that preclude mastery, a frock unconscious if you will. If it isn’t love, what is it?

The question, of course, leads back to the mother. In 1924, the year before Woolf named her frock consciousness, she had also been photographed for Vogue, that time in a dress many critics speculated was her mother’s. The claim that it belonged to Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson) is unsubstantiated, yet the instinct to associate the undeniably Victorian garb with Woolf’s late mother implied a connection between the lost maternal figure and the daughter’s fashion sense. Although Woolf wore more contemporary clothes for the 1925 photoshoot, the spectre of her mother nevertheless gives life, so to speak, to her concept. “I have been sitting to Vogue, the Becks that is, in their mews which Mr. Woolner built as his studio, & perhaps it was there he thought of my mother, whom he wished to marry, I think,” she recalls. The “Becks” here are chief Vogue photographers Maurice Adams Beck and Helen Macgregor, but, more importantly, Woolf fixates on the memory of her late mother who declined Pre-Raphealite sculptor Thomas Woolner’s advances to both sculpt and wed her. As fashion’s preeminent lens looks upon Woolf, she imagines her mother through the gaze of a man who was in love with her. The recovered moment, reaching back to the memory of her mother as a memory of love’s desire, is Woolf’s primal scene of frock consciousness. 

According to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage of childhood development, the young child comes to identify with the reflection in the mirror which shows the image of a whole person, instead of the partial perspective from the vantage of our bodies. But the unified image, while providing a necessary degree of narcissism for an emergent self, is always illusory, leaving an alienating gap created by the knowledge that there is something “other” in the mirror. As Lacan has it, one’s sense of self is established in early childhood through looking, since we identify with the recognition of that other we see. Building on this theory, D.W. Winnicott writes that “the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face,” and if we don’t feel whole under her gaze, then we might continue searching for ways to appeal to her. In the studio, for instance, Woolf imagines her style assessed by present company obliquely, by imagining how her mother may have been regarded once, while perpetually remaining beholden to her mother’s regard.

Not unlike her fellow analysts Lacan and Winnicott, Melanie Klein theorized that the mother’s withdrawal of her breast gives the baby their first feeling of deprivation and, through this absence, initiates a fantasy. This unconscious fantasy finds a home in other objects, such as a thumb to suck on. The pursuit of style, I think, is similarly made of fantasy and fracture. It’s a source of pleasure that carries feelings of inadequacy, a love that is not love. 

Woolf almost certainly would have objected to all of this, but not because psychoanalysis was foreign to her. Her own Hogarth Press was the first publisher of James Strachey’s English translations of Sigmund Freud. Woolf’s brother Adrian was a psychoanalyst who hosted Melanie Klein’s lectures in his home. Although she was closely connected to the establishment of psychoanalysis in England, Woolf wasn’t an acolyte and, according to her biographer Hermione Lee, didn’t actually read Freud until after she met him at his home in Hampstead in 1939 (about two years before her death). That didn’t stop her from having opinions about it. In a 1920 review of the novel An Imperfect Mother by J.D. Beresford titled “Freudian Fiction,” Woolf laments the oversimplification of psychoanalytic logic, deeming it useful for diagnosis but useless for art. “All the characters have become cases,” she complains.

Not only was she skeptical of its application to literature and criticism, but she appears to have believed analysis was dangerous for the artist’s imagination. This is the reason British psychoanalyst Alix Strachey gave for why Woolf never underwent analysis, even though she had a lifelong struggle with mental illness leading back to her mother’s death when she was thirteen and culminating in her eventual suicide. 

Whether or not you want to read psychoanalysis into Woolf’s “frock consciousness,” style is more than merely a reflection of means or taste: it allows a peek into the psyche. In her recent book Dress, Dreams & Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2025), renowned fashion historian Valerie Steele points out that “we sometimes also fear that our dress will expose conscious feelings that we would prefer to keep secret, just as a blush or rash can appear, like a neurotic symptom, on the surface of the body.” At the Vogue shoot, Woolf observed that fashion insiders share in a world that “connects them & protects them from others,” those “foreign bodies” like herself. Her description makes being unfashionable sound like a contagion to be avoided with constant vigilance by stylish paranoiacs. But if fashion puts up a barrier, it’s both to signal distinction from others and conceal our vulnerability to their judgements. 

Sometimes fashion likes to get ahead of its symptoms by incorporating them. The conscious centering of the unconscious has been a preoccupation for many of the last centuries’ most influential designers. Elsa Schiaparrelli’s collaborations with Salvador Dalí brought fantastical, surrealist imagery out of a dream and onto a dinner jacket. John Galliano recast Christian Dior as the “first true fetish designer” and, at the helm of Dior, released a collection in 2000 called “Freud or Fetish.” In 1998, Marc Jacobs made parapraxis literal by screen printing Freud’s face onto an actual slip. He might have enjoyed that. 

In his letters to his then fiancée Martha Bernays, Freud reveals himself to be a man keenly obsessed with tailoring, to the point of spendthrift. He fantasized about dressing his future wife like a princess and, as a student in Paris, gazed at the sumptuous style of French women, comparing them in their confident adornment to the Sphinx, a man eater. Years later, Freud would use the myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection, to describe the type whose pride of person is so profound that the rest of the world falls away. To Freud, narcissistic women in particular are captivating because their profuse self-love is so generous you can’t help but be charmed by it. Freud may have been sending a message when, upon meeting Woolf, he gave her a narcissus flower.

More than mere self-obsession, however, fashion seduces us through social spectacles, where we introject the latest styles from others. As a 17-year-old on a trip to Paris, I bought an ankle-length Isabel Marant dress, having watched, out of the corner of my eye, a beautiful French woman buy the same one. She left on the back of a motorcycle with an equally beautiful French man. Her hair-flipping insouciance, the winking smile she gave me in the changing room, and her projected warmth all amounted to an invitation to take a piece of her with me. By stepping into the dress, I too could step into a life in which I was as nonchalantly sexy, spirited, and uninhibited as I imagined her to be. I still reach for the dress sometimes; the fantasy works.

Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway famously begins with shopping. Clarissa Dalloway, a member of London’s political class, sets out to buy the flowers herself for a party she’s hosting that evening. Browsing alongside others allows a keyhole view into their tastes and habits, and while she ponders all these pedestrians near the park gates in postwar Piccadilly, she goes about making her dinner party purchases. A blast from a dignitary’s car, sounding like a pistol shot, reverberates through storefronts where, after a brief collective flinch, young women carry on deliberating bridal lingerie and glove lengths. Shopping invites curated fantasies to mingle with spontaneous ones. Perusing window dressing on Bond and Oxford Streets, Clarissa stops in front of a shop where, before the War, you could buy “almost perfect gloves.” She doesn’t say whether the gloves or the women buying them have changed, but a shift has taken place nonetheless. Whereas Clarissa’s uncle used to say a woman was known by her gloves and shoes, her daughter Elizabeth “cared not a straw for either of them.” Upon returning to London from India, one of the first things Clarissa’s old flame Peter Walsh notices is likewise the change in dress: slimmer lines, a propensity for black, powder, rouge, and lips “cut with a knife.” The postwar woman, he observes, will do her makeup in public and marry when it suits her. 

The modern woman was shaped by new personal freedoms and the obliteration of perceived global order, changes complemented by Freud’s repudiation of Victorian sexual mores. Her clothes announced this newfound liberty, but a change in silhouette or hemline sometimes disguised how little things had progressed at all. In her 1929 essay “Womanliness and Masquerade,” Joan Riviere, a psychoanalyst and translator of Freud for Hogarth Press, argued that women who wanted to participate in male spheres, namely intellectualism, wore femininity like a costume in order to assuage men’s castration anxiety. For this type of woman, having it all was a performance that beckoned approval by father figures. Decades later, another Joan—Didion—built a journalistic persona towing the line between femininity and masculinity to successful ends, for whom fashion was no less integral. In her 1979 essay “The White Album,” Didion deliciously recounts the packing list that was taped inside her closet during the years she flew, at a moment’s notice, off to report. Her flagrantly feminine items like skirts, leotards, a bra, tampax, lived alongside more hardboiled articles like bourbon, cigarettes, legal pads, and pens. 

The neutrality Didion aspired to was meant to help her blend in on either side of the political culture of the 60s. But it also helped her present as androgynous enough to be simultaneously respectable and unassuming. It’s what Eve Babitz was getting at when she pointedly asked, “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” More than a description of Didion’s physical form, Babitz references Didion’s smallness as a stylistic choice accentuated by her clothes. The slouchy minimalism of Didion’s wardrobe hung on her body in such a way that it looked like nothing could be small enough to cling to her. Coincidentally—though Freud would say there’s no such thing—this remark was in a letter where Babitz railed against Didion for not reading Woolf: “It’s entirely about you that you can’t stand her diaries.” Babitz wisely recognized Woolf as a progenitor, paving the way for Didion to reject her like a passé pair of gloves. Perhaps a doppelganger to Woolf sitting for Vogue, Didion went on to star in a 2015 Céline advertisement shot by Juergen Teller, looking as cool as ever in her 80s. Her attention to appearance reveals a settled, if perhaps ironic, frock consciousness.

In contrast to the age of Woolf’s modernists or Didion and Babitz’s 60s rupture, when fashion trends seemed to telegraph the ethos of cultural movements, dressing nowadays can feel oddly ahistorical. As teens visiting our well-dressed aunt in London, my sister and I used to tread the same streets as Mrs. Dalloway, indulging in Topshop, Primark, maybe Selfridges, all of which still had the aura of rarity for us Torontonians. We had no profound insights about the fashions that came before ours. We looked “skimpy” said our aunt, and she was right, but compared to what? There is undoubtedly more freedom now in dressing to defy gender norms, to wear less if you want to, or wear more, or whatever. But if anything goes, then what you choose is all the more revealing. It wasn’t that we needed to be wearing more, but thinking more about what we were wearing. 

In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes writes that, “To the extent that the garment is erotic, it must be allowed to persist here and disintegrate there, to be partially absent, to play with the body’s nudity.” Discontinuity, Barthes adds, “either plays itself up or plays itself down.” Likewise, considered dressing is its own kind of cover up and effort is the thing to be played up or down. Sometimes style is derived from the effacement or absence of style, but even those who don’t care about fashion can’t opt out of getting dressed. In her 1982 essay “Dressing and Undressing,” Anita Brookner describes the two acts as “bewilderingly interchangeable.” Brookner observed that in her academic milieu, attempts to underplay fashion came across as hopelessly regressive. She scathingly writes that “women and men can now array themselves for certain tasks in the grown up equivalent of rompers” and, further, that “their errors of taste will be presented as calculated and disarming.” Any approach to dressing, Brookner shows, is at the very least a conspicuous gesture of culture. There is no escaping fashion statements, but you can get better at reading them. The recent outpouring of media that delves into the psychological dimensions of clothes shows that the average dresser has an interest in doing so. 

Steele’s Dress, Dreams, and Desire was accompanied by an exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and the combined output prompted a proliferation of reviews and meditations on the relationship between fashion and psychoanalysis. The audience for it might have already been primed by listening to Bella Freud’s podcast Fashion Neurosis, where her interviewees lay on a couch, simulating a session, answering questions that prompt memories of getting dressed. Freud is a fashion designer and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund. Though she claimed to The New Yorker to have only read The Interpretation of Dreams, her interviews are often full of revelations that lend themselves perfectly to analysis—like the time Kate Moss said that she needs to wear a heel when she’s naked. Freud doesn’t point out the phallic symbolism, but it hangs there anyway.

Even when allusions to psychoanalysis aren’t spelled out as explicitly as in Freud’s podcast, they rear their heads in fashion culture. The Good Buy podcast from Harper’s Bazaar asks guests to sort their clothing purchases into regret buys, repeat buys, and dream buys, which makes the contents of a closet look more like a list of symptoms. British Vogue’s In the Bag YouTube series has stars like Angelina Jolie, Arianna Grande, and Linda Evangelista perform show and tell of what they’re carrying around: everything from pencils to pills, it turns out. Celebrities can’t just sport the latest “it” bag; we want to know what’s inside it. 

A lot of this programming is being sliced and served to us on platforms that diminish interpretative skills and incite an anxious compulsion for more. The rapid influx of fashion trends on Instagram and TikTok—butter yellow to lemon yellow, mob wives and old money, balletcore and cowboycore, Carrie Bradshaw and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy—is a stream of consciousness too crowded even for high modernism. “Drowning in a deluge of images without context, words without meaning, information without distinction—this is the subjective experience in an economy of immediacy,” claims Anna Kornbluh in Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Here, Kornbluh means style capaciously, in the sense of genre or form more broadly. Scrolling through endless online imagery, Kornbluh argues, traps us in the Lacanian imaginary, or the narcissistic mirror, holding the screen of wholeness up to a scattered subject. The way out, she says, is through the final step of Lacan’s mirror stage: entry into the symbolic order of language and critical engagement with the cultural touchstones that mediate our experience of the world. 

The pillars of the fashion realm have been giving way to social media for years. Fashion magazines are slimmer and scarcer. Legacy department stores have mostly disappeared. Sometimes I feel a pang for the missing landmarks of the old guard: the subway newsstand where I used to buy Nylon and InStyle after school, or the Bay at Yonge and Bloor. Last winter I racked my brain wondering where I could buy gloves—not Mrs. Dalloway’s almost perfect gloves, just gloves. I don’t know how we can learn to dress in a way that reflects ourselves if fashion is not folded into our daily lives, where carefully constructed fantasies can rub up against the reality of our bodies, our surroundings, our needs, and invite us to really inhabit them. I dream of courting fantasies by pausing in front of a window display or seeking out pages of editorial instead of receiving them forcefully in the grip of the attention economy.

There is, however, a shift to recover an unconscious fantasy of fashion by creating new visions out of old forms. When Chloe Malle succeeded Anna Wintour as head of American Vogue, one of her signature plans was fewer but better print issues, using thicker paper for a more pleasurable tactile experience. Stores like 100% Silk Shop in Toronto have also returned to the old retail format of print catalogues, the pleasant thumbing through of which is a gateway to trying on the real thing. Elevating touch as central to the sensory experience of fashion, according to Iris Marion Young, interrupts the dominant gaze. “When I ‘see’ myself in wool, it’s partly the wool itself that attracts me, its heavy warmth and textured depth,” she writes in her 1988 essay, “Women Recovering Our Clothes.” Drawing on Luce Irigaray, who suggests touch is the medium of feminine desire, Young searches for a fashion fantasy that is more about immersion and less about mastery, where active subjectivity can be reclaimed. As she correctly notes, to delight in fashion fantasies runs the risk of ignoring exploitative labour conditions that produce so many of our wares and the imperialist context from which they emerge. There are also oppressive beauty standards and environmental degradation to contend with. Our relationships to style can’t be made wholly transparent to us, nor can fashion somehow be excised from the hegemony of capitalism. But fashion is superfluous and creative. For Young, this is reason enough to turn the fashion fantasy against the dominant order. Its form far outpaces its function. 

As Woolf suggests, I think most of us would rather be characters than cases. If the process of analysis makes repressed desires understandable, plumbing our frock unconscious may be a way back to a richer frock consciousness. For Woolf, this consciousness exists on a continuum of shared experience that she urges us to interrogate: “You must not break it. It is something real. You must keep it up; conspire together.” As she struggles to find the words, the implication that fashion is a language unto itself, if perhaps a frayed one, comes through.

Clothes offer us ways to be done up, but may also be part of our undoing. On a cold March day in 1941, Woolf walked out of her house in Sussex wearing an old fur coat, a hat, and wellington boots. The countryside practicality of the hat and boots along with the fur coat’s glamour traces a somewhat incongruous image. This isn’t the picture of a woman who put herself together to be looked at, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t conscious of what she was wearing, or that her unconscious didn’t conspire with her clothing. She may have thought about the coat, selected it as the right choice or regretted it as the wrong one, before filling her pockets with heavy stones and entering the onrush of the River Ouse, where the garment provided its final act of mediation between life and death.

Eleanor Zichy is a writer from Toronto. She has worked as a reporter and actress. Her play Double Exposure was presented in Consecon in 2023 in partnership with the Al Purdy A-frame Association. She writes between Toronto and Prince Edward County.