The word ‘fetishism’ has a long and very complex story. It is first used in French by Charles de Brosses, a colonist of the eighteenth century to refer to the cult that ancient pagan religions pay to material objects. These sacred material things are called fetishes. In these times, fetishism is considered to be a feature of underdeveloped civilizations and bears a negative connotation. Fetishism is perceived as a set of superstitious beliefs opposed to the rationality prevailing in the Century of Enlightenment in Europe.
Psychoanalysis and Marxist economy have in a way extracted fetishism from its colonial anchorage. Freud observes that among his patients, some of them demonstrate a fetishist behavior:
they have erotic desire for inanimate objects, or to be more precise, they cannot feel sexually aroused or satisfied if they miss a certain type of inanimate object.
Freud’s interpretation is that the fetish "is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and... does not want to give up.... if a woman has been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger." So according to Freud, fetishism is a solution to the castration complex coming from childhood experience of the gender alterity.
https://www.amazon.com/Fashion-Fetishism-Corsets-Tight-Lacing-Body-Sculpture/dp/0750938080
Two questions follow then:
1/ are there privileged objects for fetishism?
2/ are men the only fetishists?
Freud observes that the organs or objects chosen as substitutes for the absent female phallus are not necessarily symbols of the penis. It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in the original traumatic situation. It is as though the last impression before the traumatic one is retained as a fetish. Thus as Freud says, "the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic". This is why corsets, shoes and boots, underwear but also leather pieces that are often treated as a second skin, are favorite items for fetishist practices and symbols of this subculture.
https://indie-mag.com/2018/03/fetishism-in-fashion/
Because fetishism is an answer to the castration complex, it would appear at first that fetishism is strictly a masculine sort of behavior. In a recent book on fashion and fetishism, fashion historian Valerie Steele notes as well that fetishism is more widespread among men than women. But in an earlier text on fetishism, Freud said that "all women are clothes fetishists". He also adds that even the most intelligent of them follow demands of fashion, even if it is not to their advantage. It is difficult to forget the phallocentric character of the psychoanalytic take on fetishism and to go beyond these obviously misogynist reflections but it is interesting for us to discuss the possibility of an equivalent to fetishism for women, and to the specific function of fashion in this context.
According to Freud, feminine fetishism for clothes in general has to be explained according to the woman’s quest for the phallus which is the symbol for masculine power in Freudian theory. But it would be too simple just to say that clothes are fetish for women because they make them more appealing to men.
It seems, on the opposite, that women enjoy clothes not because of the mens’ gaze, but because clothes play a role in their own identity process. Women, exactly as men, make use of fetishes to feel complete, to feel as a whole, and to conjure up the threat that the original discovery of the gender difference might have caused. But why is fashion relevant in this case? Probably because the fetish is by definition an illusion: the fetish takes the place of the missing phallus, it is a fiction about something missing. So no actual single object can really fill that void, and the subject is doomed to try one object after the other and keeps looking for the right fetish that only exists as a fantasy.
Hence the power of fashion and its constant shifts: the success of fashion is based on the fetishistic relationship to clothes.
As we want our clothes to fill a gap that cannot be filled, we only derive partial and temporary satisfaction out of them and need new dress all the time. It is quite interesting that, from the years 1960’s on to now, mainstream fashion has adopted many of the codes of the fetishist subculture: leather, rubber, cruel shoes, tattoos, body-piercing, underwear as outerwear, corsets, which were all more or less dedicated to private and special use, became quite common on catwalks and advertising campaigns, pervading even high street fashion. Designers like Vivienne Westwood, Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Paul Gaultier or John Galliano have contributed to put fetishist outfits on the public place, and to promote a sexual chic style that owes a lot to a sartorial material that was considered evidence for perverted habits. This long lasting fashion trend has been criticized both for degrading the woman’s image, and for spoiling the true fetish culture, making it too commercial and meaningless.
Fashion clothes are also a surface one projects her own fantasies onto: they help us to imagine other identities for ourselves, and to build new identities for ourselves. And as Freud and many other authors have established, sexual life is critical in the definition and construction of the self, so it is no mystery that clothes in general, being so intimately connected to the body, bear so many sexual connotations.
Feminist critics have attacked these uses of fetishist references as positioning women as objects or victims. It might hold in some cases, but in many others, women wearing these kinds of outfits were on the opposite pictured as dominant, strong and free. As Valerie Steele has written, "the attraction that many women have to fashion—and fetish fashion, in particular—may be related to their desire to assert themselves as independent sexual beings". It might be a good explanation, after all, for the sex appeal of the inorganic that Walter Benjamin associated to the cult of the commodities in the modern era. Fashion clothes are not only ways to cover oneself, or to express one’s personality, social role, or current mood.
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