IngentaConnect J.C. Flugel and the Nude Future

Abstract:

John Flügel (1874-1955) was an English academic psychologist, a prominent member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and a leading figure in the movement for liberal social reform between the two world wars (1918-1939). A member of the Men's Dress Reform Party, in 1930 he published The Psychology of Clothes, the first Freudian-inspired analysis of dress and fashion. In this work he advances the idea that clothing is a `compromise-formation' that mediates between the desire of children to exhibit their naked bodies and the later social prohibition that the body be covered for the sake of modesty. For Flügel, the story of clothing is the story of the relative strength of these two forces. Flügel explores a number of areas where he detected real and potential variations in the nature and styles of clothing. Flügel argues that clothes emerge at the time of the appearance of the human social order because they are adopted by all the members of the original ancestral group who are thought to precede all the later developments of human culture. In this sense clothes for Flügel are an ancient cultural institution and one with a universal presence in human life. Flügel examines the differences between contemporary clothing and uses his modesty-exhibitionist duality to analyse grand clothing differences such as those between the sexes through to individual clothing styles. In all of these cases his method is to trace out the relative strengths of the forces of modesty and of exhibitionism that are embedded in the forms of clothing. Flügel's final speculations were concerned with the `future of clothing' within western societies. He was of the opinion that as we became more proficient in controlling our physical environment as well as being less ruled by the forces of modesty - often aligned by Flügel with irrational authoritarian societies - our dependence, indeed our need for the `compromise-formation' that were clothes, would disappear. Dress would either vanish altogether as the social order became less punitive or it would be limited to a number of stable `rational' costumes. Flügel had seen the future and it was nude.

J.C. Flügel and the Nude Future