In her book Fashion and Psychoanalysis, Alison Bancroft investigates a selection of garments that embody our most intimate and fundamental human fears. Shit abruptly gets real as designs by fashion superstars like John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, and Alexander McQueen demonstrate the "hopelessness of bodily containment" or the "desecration of the body in the grave," Bancroft writes. There's also the humiliation of public nudity, the "terrifying maw of castration," the "visceral, bloody, traumatic process" of giving birth, and many other compelling unpleasantries.

Bancroft's language manages to be both dense and lively, and layers of research perpetuate every idea. Describing clothes isolated from their wearers, Bancroft references Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny. Whether displayed in cases or strewn on floors, all empty garments take on "a sinister otherworldliness," she writes. She cites the Greek legend of Procrustes, who "forced his victims to lie on a bed that he made them fit [into] by cutting off or stretching" their limbs. One great segment discusses the function of fashion photography and how it draws upon the "fundamental asymmetry of desire." Another details a McQueen ensemble from his La Poupée collection—it has a square metal frame attached by shackles to the model's arms and thighs to provoke an upsetting "jerkiness" and "artificiality" in her movement, "like a doll being 'walked' along the floor by a child's hands," Bancroft says, and with this, McQueen "is staging a brutality of feminine experience."

Bancroft approaches some of the more repulsing subjects with a certain delicacy. When performance artist Leigh Bowery gave himself an enema onstage, he forced his audience "to confound the ordering of bodily interior and exterior," Bancroft writes. (Also, he'd arrived "naked save for black stockings that stopped at the top of his thighs and black makeup covering his face and head," accompanied by a woman "dressed in an elaborate tutu and bodice spraying air freshener over the crowd"—and somehow this last detail is the most disquieting.) Years earlier, in a trendy London bar, Bancroft observed "a young woman with a taxidermied rat clipped to her hair. The rat had cream-coloured fur, and was about seven or eight inches long." From Bancroft's studied conclusion, this accessory "served to encourage a physical distance between [the wearer]... and those men who might wish to approach her desirously."

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