On the Couch

Freud‘s Couch

I want this blog to be a comforting journey through history, with me as your happy guide telling you things you didn’t know along with things you did know, but I can tell you a little more about – hopefully – and make it all come alive for you. So, what does Freud’s couch have to do with this, you might be wondering. Well, the answer is twofold. First, back  in days of yore, patients would go and visit Dr Freud and lounge on his couch, telling him their problems and he would relax them and help solve those problems. The whole thing was rather lovely and relaxing and … except it wasn’t.

Dear readers, I have been on Freud’s couch. He wasn’t around, being dead an’ all, and strictly speaking I was being a very bad person by getting on it in the Freud Museum, but people who know me, know I like to misbehave in museums and were possible touch things I shouldn’t. The misbehaviour reached serious levels in the Freud museum, because I decided I wanted to know what it was like to lay on  the father of psychoanalysis’  couch and see how it felt to be one of his patients. I did it, so you don’t have to and I’m here to tell you it felt uncomfortable, uneasy and ever so slightly unhygienic. In short, I’m pretty sure that being his patient was the opposite of relaxing and calming and that by the time he got round to telling you that everything you thought was based on hysteria or cock, you’d accept it and pretend to be cured just so you never had to get on his horrid couch again. In ever shorter: Freud’s couch was minging.

So, the second part of the answer is that while I want all my readers to feel as though they’re laying on a couch while they get told all sorts of wondrous things about fashion, clothing, design, the whys and wherefores of what clothing meant, especially to women and how it can be seen as something that has and still can restrict our freedom as well as something that says something about our place and role in society. I want that imaginary couch to be comfortable and somewhere that you’re not longing to jump out of, nor somewhere where a coke-fiend with a beard is droning on and on about cock. His couch is a metaphor for all that can be wrong with being on the couch. Our couch will be whatever couch takes your fancy, a place to go and think about things girly, pretty, strong, sensual, feminist to the max, dreamy, ugly, superficial, important, cultural, life-changing and permanent. Cock will be at a minimum here unless and until I decide to produce a post about the codpiece and then all bets are off.

I want your couch to be a happy place, where you get to read the minutiae of clothing and fashion, from the ancient world to the modern day with no real timeline being followed, because that’s not really how it works. We may go from ancient Greece to 193o’s Lanvin, because the drapery will be all. We might spend a few posts going through the renaissance and then another few following the career of Frederick Worth. We’ll just let the mood and the muse take us and I hope to be a great tour guide, because, even though I do say so myself, I am  a fashion historian par excellence! I also love interiors, so there will be brief forays into those, because I want us all to take note of the fact that beauty and comfort are very  often not one and the same thing. Our poor ancestors often suffered far more discomfort than we would ever put up with. Why? Hopefully, we’ll find out along the way.

In the meantime, here’s another couch, this is the one I’ll be laying on while talking to you – in my mind of course, fashion historians are notably skint and can’t afford beautiful couches. Feel free to join me on this one or to find one of your own. If you find one you love and want to share it with me, please send me links in the responses and one day soon we can have a post which includes all our lovely couches and why they’re so right for each of us.

My couch – for now. I’ll no doubt change my mind along the way