Within the depth-psychological corpus, clothes function as one of the most semantically dense symbolic registers, operating simultaneously on personal, collective, and archetypal planes. The dominant Jungian tradition treats clothing as the primary dream-image of the persona—that socially constructed surface which mediates between inner life and collective expectation. Harding articulates this most precisely: garments must harmonize with historical time, occasion, and the wearer’s actual psychological age, so that inappropriate dress betrays inauthenticity. Edinger deepens the symbolism by noting that undressing, interpreted from an interior standpoint, signifies putrefactio—the stripping away of incarnated identity to expose the naked essential psyche, a movement toward soul-extraction. Jung himself extends the symbol into cultural critique, reading Western women’s fashion as a symptom of sexual morbidity, contrasting it with Indian dress where concealment preserves the mystery of revelation. A secondary register appears in ascetic and contemplative traditions (the Philokalia, Dōgen) where elaborate or gaudy clothing marks spiritual regression, vainglory, and attachment to matter. The Freudian tradition treats hat and cloak as genital symbols. Across these positions a productive tension persists: clothes as protective mask enabling social existence versus clothes as concealment obstructing authentic self-disclosure. The term thus opens onto the central depth-psychological problematic of surface and depth, presentation and being.