My first project explores the long history of what was called “the psychology of clothes.” Theorists believed that dress offered privileged access to subjects’ interiority while at the same time—since it was visible on the surface of the body—rendering that interiority in a form amenable to scientific observation. The link between clothing and personality was delineated by researchers in the first half of the twentieth century, namely by sexologists in the United States and England, British psychoanalysts and American psychologists. Sexologists built a diagnostic category, transvestism, out of the observation that certain individuals had seemingly anomalous relationships with their clothes. Psychoanalysts, meanwhile, theorized about how clothing was implicated in the formation of self and its relationship to others, constructing concepts that allowed for further research across the mind sciences and beyond. And market researchers investigated how individuals and items interacted, using what they learned to sell goods and to extend the psychology of clothes beyond academic spaces. The spread of these ideas, however, invited critique by cultural commentators lamenting the state of society in the 1960s and 1970s. According to critics’ arguments, the narcissism of consumer culture, and of women in particular, made fashion choices shallow and not worthy of serious study. A particular point of contention for these critics was also the spread of psychoanalysis outside the clinic, and the psychology of clothes presented a convenient lightning rod for these debates. As a result, researchers were no longer able to unproblematically rely on that association for the basis of their science. In this moment of crisis, the field of fashion studies arose as an acceptable means to continue thinking about dress and identity.