When I called Bella Freud to interview her for the inaugural issue of PERSONA, the first thing I asked was how it felt to be the subject of an entire magazine.
“Are they really sure it’s just me and not anyone else?” she asked.
I assured her this was the case.
“My God,” she gasped. “Shit. Okay, I’ll do my best.”
That butter-wouldn’t-melt impishness has become familiar to listeners of Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis, where she interviews fashion designers, musicians, filmmakers, fine artists and characters like Daphne Guinness and Nicky Haslam in that nexus of Anglo-aristo-bohemia where Freud herself resides.
In a media landscape reshaped by the podcast press tour, Freud’s show feels like a prestige destination for a substantial interview — less Hot Ones and more Michael Parkinson or Dick Cavett. She has enticed famously elusive guests like Juergen Teller and Annie Leibovitz onto her couch for hour-long conversations about their most private reminiscences, their creative processes, even their greatest humiliations and fears.
The show was snapped up by Vox Media after its first season, and she now travels internationally to film with guests. Earlier this year, Freud travelled to Paris to interview Dior’s creative director Jonathan Anderson in the Jardin des Tuileries ahead of the brand’s autumn winter 2027 show. (They are mutual fans of each other’s work — Freud wears Anderson’s Dior throughout this shoot.)
As a fashion designer, Freud is best known for colourful suits worn by everyone from Tilda Swinton to Olivia Wilde and Nick Cave. “I think I re-invented having a school uniform in my fashion brand,” she said on a recent episode of Fashion Neurosis. “My suits are just permutations of uniforms, and because I didn’t have a tie, which is what I particularly longed for, I just made my own one and wear it all the time.”
But after perfecting her look since founding the brand in 1990, Freud felt restless.
“As a designer, you always have to push yourself further to have new ideas and new looks,” she told me. “But in the end, I just like the same things, so in my design work I just kind of do the same thing. I wanted to push myself to go further in a different realm as well as clothes.” Fashion Neurosis is far from the first extracurricular activity Freud has undertaken. Here is a fraction of her CV — she has launched a line of fragrances, conceived of eight fashion films, curated a season at Sotheby’s, launched a magazine with Anita Pallenberg and co-founded a charity for Palestinian refugees.
It is not as if she was some idler searching for an outlet. But digging deeper into the psyche of fashion people, Freud tells me, was something she had been thinking about for a long time. “I’ve felt for 10 years at least there’s a really good story to write about how people are together in fashion,” she said. “How sort of resourceful they are … and the kind of strange community of taking care of each other as well as how fashion can be so competitive.”
Freud originally shot episodes of what would become Fashion Neurosis just before the COVID-19 pandemic. It stalled during lockdown, but she found she could not get the project out of her head.
“I just became completely obsessed in a way that I suppose I’d been when I became a designer,” she says. “I wanted to be in a band first, but I didn’t have that obsession.” But with the podcast it was like “when [she] went to design school and just would not let it go.” In the podcast and its accompanying video format released on YouTube, Freud is stationed in the richly patinated — or rather intensely knackered — leather armchair that once sat in her father, the artist Lucian Freud’s boiler room.
Borrowing from another of her forebears, she stations her analysands on a sofa, which extends into a bed for rare group interviews, as in the one with three-piece sister act Haim. The camera hangs just over her guests’ faces, allowing the viewer to peer into their eyes with incredible intimacy. Freud’s great talent as an interviewer is her microscopic power of observation. Just the way her guests situate themselves on the sofa is fruit for commentary.
"In the end, I just like the same things, so in my design work I just kind of do the same thing. I wanted to push myself to go further in a different realm as well as clothes.”
For instance, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, she told me, “looked amazing… the way some men lie on the couch and they put their hand up like they’re in bed after just having sex. And you think, ‘Wow.’ It was fantastic.” Each episode begins with Freud asking her guest to explain why they have chosen their outfit for the show. That first question immediately makes clear why a show like Fashion Neurosis is so valuable. It breaks down the fourth wall of the standard talk-show format, in which celebrity self-fashioning is rarely addressed beyond the superficial question of “who are you wearing?”
When one guest says they chose their outfit for comfort, while another says they knew the sofa was white so they wanted to provide contrast for the camera, we are already having a different conversation about fashion than the one we are accustomed to. “No one asks fashion people anything interesting,” Freud laments. “They ask the same dullard questions, and so they get nothing. And there is this goldmine there, and they’ve got no idea because they’re so lazy. They don’t even bother to find out. Like, they’ll just say ‘what’s your inspiration?’”
Though many of her guests are fashion icons whose lives revolve around clothing, some of her best interviewees believe they have not given much thought to their clothes, or resent clothing outright, but come to realise they can easily tell their life’s story through clothing.
In that sense, the show can be a bit like Desert Island Discs for fashion, with a guest’s first pair of special shoes standing in for the song that marked their teenage rebellion. When the artist Es Devlin tells Freud she often forgets about clothes when she is busy, she is suddenly reminded of when she wore hats every day when she had young children to cover up her undone hair. “I miss the ‘hat years mum’,” she recalls her daughter saying.
Freud has long been aware of the neurosis that fashion can incite. For her spring/summer 1994 show, she made “this bikini out of denim and this amazing pink rubber fringing and you couldn’t wash it, you couldn’t clean it in any way, and it smelled absolutely delicious. But at the fashion show, no one would wear it. No one wanted to wear a bikini, and then Kate Moss said, ‘I’ll wear it.’” When Moss sauntered down the runway holding a plastic bottle of water, “it became this iconic shot, I was so happy. It’s interesting how it just never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t be desperate to wear it. And of course, people, however beautiful they are, are self-conscious about their bodies.”
“No one asks fashion people anything interesting. They ask the same dullard questions, and so they get nothing. And there is this goldmine there, and they’ve got no idea because they’re so lazy."
This self-consciousness is something Freud understands first-hand. When she was 16 and working at Vivienne Westwood’s London boutique Seditionaries, the epicentre of London’s punk scene, Westwood asked her to walk the runway. She did not.
“I was too embarrassed at the idea of not being like the other models. I’m so self-critical. I just thought, ‘I cannot.’ And then, you know, [Vivienne] thought, ‘Well, you’re stupid.’ Maybe if she had begged me, I would have done it, but it’s one of the very few regrets I have.” Lately, she says, the self-criticism has ebbed. So much so that, just before this interview went to print, Freud finally made her runway debut walking for Willy Chavarria’s spring/summer 2027 show in Paris.
“I’m delighted to have a body. As I’ve gotten older, I love it. It’s very useful. I even like it in a way that I never did when I was young. There were millions of things wrong with it. When I got pregnant I thought, ‘God, it’s done this amazing thing.’ Hating my body was like a siphon of my thoughts and my feelings — all my energy just left out of that. It was like the opposite of a blood transfusion. I was just leaving my body all the time, my mortification about myself.”
While talking to Freud, I understand why she is known for sweaters printed with strange yet compelling phrases like “Ginsberg is God” and “Bored and Beautiful”. She speaks in accidental Zen koans — every other sentence contains a perfect soundbite, wisdom dispensed casually yet worthy of being printed on cashmere.
As we discussed her occasional performance anxiety, she told me she had “given up dread”, on the advice of her analyst. “I’m interested in doing things that save me, that stop me from frittering away my power.”
It is true Freud’s first few collections now officially count as vintage. “I loved that shade of pink,” Freud said of the baby pink velvet dress Carla Bruni wore on the August 1993 cover of British Vogue. “I felt like it gave a girl a kind of toughness, even though it was so gentle. You had to be tough to be able to pull off such a feminine shade.”
The Peter Pan collar babydoll dress Courtney Love wore — as did Freud in Steven Meisel’s 1993 “Anglo-Saxon Attitude” spread in British Vogue — has certainly come back around, most recently as inspiration for Olivia Rodrigo’s tour outfits.
In this moment when so many fashion brands are trying to position themselves as literary — Miu Miu’s annual book club, Brunello Cucinelli’s bookpile campaign, Chanel’s Literary Rendezvous, not to mention the new brand called Literary Sport — it strikes me that Freud is simply authentically interested in the life of the mind.
Novelists Zadie Smith and Karl Ove Knausgaard were two of her first season guests, and her questions about their clothing led to more insightful revelations about their writing than standard literary interviews. Bella Freud the brand also seems to have a very different celebrity placement strategy from most fashion houses. “I know [the novelist Rachel Kushner] because I saw her picture in her hardcover, and I told my PR, ‘See if she wants to borrow anything. She’s so beautiful, and she writes how I like,’ you know?”
Just before my first novel, Happiness and Love, came out last year, a fashion magazine asked if they could doa photo shoot to run alongside an interview. I was terrified, especially at the thought of forming my “public image”, something I had never given much thought to. Now I could only conceive of it in the negative, as in, what if I looked like an idiot?
At the shoot, the stylist gave me a navy blue Bella Freud suit with a baby blue silk shirt and black necktie. “Who is she?” I thought, regarding myself in the mirror. In Freud’s uniform I felt more confident than I even knew was possible. “I suppose as designers we have your back,” is how Freud explains it. “It’s a big part of the power of clothes… it’s nothing to do with vanity. It’s about getting you through things, giving you a great guise that can be your strength when you feel hopeless.”
As I transcribed the end of the interview, I noticed — with horror and embarrassment — that throughout the course of our conversation I had started to become confessional. Why did I have this urge to tell Freud, the subject of the interview, about this scene from my own life, my own fashion neuroses?
Had the dozens of hours I had listened to Freud gently prodding her guests, the way she met every confession with non-judgmental enthusiasm in that plummy gentle accent, made me seek the same treatment? I had interviewed dozens of people before, but never had this urge.
Though I am not a big believer in hereditary traits, there must be something of a natural talent in Freud — perhaps inherited from the man who originated “transference” — for earning people’s trust, drawing out their secrets, leading them to reveal themselves, to see more clearly.
“The only thing my father said about Sigmund Freud was that he was funny,” she says. “You know, my father was funny as well. But I do feel like I listen from all these different places in my being. Some people I identify with so much that I have to be careful not to get too involved in my enormous amount of sympathy and identification, my kind of crush mode.”
It is hard not to feel the same about Freud herself.
Volume 1 of PERSONA starring—and dedicated to—Bella Freud is available now.
