ABSTRACT
Women's accessories tell many stories about desire. We spend significant amounts of psychic energy desiring and acquiring shoes, bags, and jewellery. Clothing, and especially women's accessories, serve as uniquely potent tools to bridge diverse aspects of women's self experience or, as Philip M. Bromberg says, to stand in the spaces between discontinuous self experiences. Riviere questioned the motivations behind women's dress, asking why a costume was necessary and for whose benefit it was worn. Women's dress is, and always has been, a distinctive action in the mating dance. Their potency in the psychology of women is deep-seated and multilayered. The common thread in each of the three uses of the term is that a psychic process endows an object with emotional or sexual power. The use of the object to symbolize, to communicate, and to organize experience is fundamental to human psychology.
