It feels like a collective fashion world hallucination — or some kind of haute data leak. Over mellow, undulating piano riffs and the sound of a ticking clock (or is it a metronome?) the west London therapist buzzes in her next client through the intercom and she lies face up and on a pristine white couch, unmistakable in a black Saint Laurent dress and Westwood heels.
Within five minutes the most famously tight-lipped woman in fashion — Kate Moss, whose mantra is supposedly “never complain, never explain” — is unburdening herself, talking earnestly about the discomfort that accompanied her breakthrough appearance on the cover of The Face.
“I was, like, 15 and I was topless in a magazine and I was still at school,” says Moss of the black-and-white images — taken by the photographer Corinne Day on the beach at Camber Sands, East Sussex — whose publication in 1990 fired the starting gun on a new, pared-back aesthetic in fashion and our enduring obsession with a girl from Croydon.
“Even after that shoot I did cry a lot about taking my clothes off with her [Day]. I really didn’t want to do it,” Moss says, referencing a mole she felt particularly self-conscious about. This kind of distress is something she quickly had to inure herself to. “Your body’s kind of not your own when you’re a vessel for somebody else’s imagination,” she reflects. “God, that’s so interesting,” says the therapist, sympathetically, in her honeyed, slightly scuffed RP. The internet agrees — and the disclosures quickly go viral.
Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, the lavishly “visualized” podcast —– meaning you can watch too if that’s your thing — in which the fashion designer Bella Freud, 63, who is Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter, analyses well-known guests using the set-up immortalized by her most celebrated forebear, whose own markedly less pristine couch lives down the road, at Hampstead’s Freud Museum.
Freud is seen by us — but not by her supine interviewees — teasing out her guests’ innermost thoughts through their attitudes to clothing and other ostensibly surface matters of self-presentation. Fashion, she notes, is often derided as a trivial affair but its effects are profound. The wrong outfit can make you feel helplessly adrift.
Ditto lighting: “I worked really hard with the cameraman on how we could get this dreamy, flattering light —– because otherwise I’d never be able to get the caliber of guests that I want, who all know about lighting,” Freud says (case in point, a recent episode stars the actress Kristin Scott Thomas). “There are four camera angles, including an overhead one so that you could really lose yourself in that person’s thoughts, and that they could look up and kind of be joined with the viewer in a way.”
The roster of guests is impressive: “I want people who have a sensibility or are drawn to style or have something to say about it,” Freud tells me. Enter the footballer Eric Cantona, who describes his custard yellow tracksuit as a riposte to the grinding uniformity typified by today’s car colors (all black and grey, he laments), and reflects on the much-pilloried seagulls-and-trawler soliloquy that eclipsed his successful appeal against a prison sentence for kicking a spectator.
The author Zadie Smith talks with characteristic scalpel-sharp affection of her chic mother’s personal style (“I’m sure she’s the only Jamaican woman wearing a beret around Willesden”) and poignantly recalls the time her entire wardrobe was destroyed in a fire.
But Freud has outdone herself with Moss, who is unique in having “sat” for two consecutive generations of Freuds. Around the turn of the millennium, Moss let it be known that one of her unrealized ambitions was to pose for Bella’s father, the expressionist painter Lucian Freud.
“He was quite stimulated by that, and said, ‘Oh, she sounds rather wonderful,’” Freud recalls. Already a veteran member of the tight-knit Moss Posse at the time, the designer’s ears pricked up. “Ah, do you wanna meet?” A lunch date was duly arranged, and the rest is (art) history. The resulting portrait of a pregnant Moss was sold for $7.29 million after a furious bidding battle.
“They got on incredibly well, of course. They were actually quite similar,” Freud says. I ask how, exactly. “Just sort of renegades, really — very talented people who push things forward.” Unexpectedly, after Freud shared some “scrappy” test recordings of the podcast with Croydon’s finest, Moss demanded to be a guest on Fashion Neurosis, and Freud says she is pinching herself at her good fortune. “She’s extremely well read, a brilliant noticer and incredibly funny,” she says of Moss.
Fashion, she notes, is often derided as a trivial affair but its effects are profound. The wrong outfit can make you feel helplessly adrift.
It’d be remiss of me not to tell you what Freud is wearing: a black cashmere turtleneck sweater from a bygone collection. Deceptively simple, its details — including a woven star that interrupts the gold stripe of one arm, near the wrist — are meticulously premeditated.
The “strictness” of such designs is a reaction, she says, against the hippy-trail aesthetics of her 1960s and 1970s childhood. Her beloved, beautiful mother was the artist Bernadine Coverley who — as fictionalized in her sister Esther Freud’s novel Hideous Kinky — decamped to Marrakesh, small girls in tow, for nearly two years while she pursued her bohemian dream of becoming a Sufi, to near-ruinous effect.
On returning to the UK, Bella Freud relished the prospect of wearing a school uniform, only for her progressive East Sussex secondary to summarily ditch theirs, “devastating” for young Bella, although she had to pretend otherwise.
I wonder whether she wasn’t also reacting to the destabilizing experience of being whisked off to Morocco, a bewildering land where she didn’t speak the language. Not exactly, she suggests. The souks were enchanting and she soon picked up some Arabic.
But of the film version of Hideous Kinky, in which a young Kate Winslet played the Coverley character, Freud does allow the following: “I watched it again years later with my son when he was ten or eight and I noticed that it was a lot more frightening than I’d remembered.”
Her sanguine approach extends to the challenging market conditions in fashion (“it’s a good moment to be a small business because the big businesses are so used to a certain way of functioning, and how much money that entails, it’s difficult for them to pare back from that”). Her label has stayed resolutely independent; a more affordable range of her signature slogan sweaters flew from M&S rails in October.
Consultations chez Bella take place underneath Francis Bacon’s pastel-hued Lying Figure, 1969 — a reproduction, she is quick to point out: “Otherwise I’d have about two hundred million on my wall, which I most definitely don’t.”
Freud’s cheery pragmatism manifests too in how she frames her relationship with her late father, who died within days of her mother in 2011. Bella’s half-sister, the writer Rose Boyt, recently published a memoir, Naked Portrait, in which she writes excoriatingly of her demoralizing experiences sitting for the otherwise absent yet godlike Lucian, a Jewish former child refugee from Berlin whose misogynistic diatribes and repulsive nose-picking are foregrounded.
Bella — who also sat for her father on several occasions — politely declines to discuss Boyt’s book but acknowledges that her take, habitually parlayed into Sunday Stories for her brand’s website and social media channels, is more upbeat.
She recalls jolly lunches at hotspots including the Wolseley, at which Lucian and her young son, James Lux Fox, “in his dandy phase, wearing a navy blue homburg hat given to me by [the milliner] Philip Treacy”, would gleefully assail each other with pellets of bread.
“I’m definitely not putting a spin on it,” she says, “but I’m certainly choosing how I want people to see me, really — more than, you know, be a victim of my life, as it were — which I don’t feel like.”
Of Lucian, she continues, “I did have a very positive experience with him. He was just … he was a different type of father but he was an ally and I really appreciated that.”
The handwritten Bella Freud logo and trademark doodle of a jaunty whippet, complete with lolling tongue, flowed from Lucian’s pen. Another enduring bequest was his advice that Bella should devote herself single-mindedly to her metier.
An encounter with Vivienne Westwood in a bar led to a formative stint working in Westwood’s Seditionaries boutique, after which Freud founded her brand in 1990. The learning curve, she says, is endless — but endlessly pleasing. “I’ve done every job in the business — I’ve been production manager, I’ve done the press, the sourcing, I’ve been to shoe factories. The great informer is learning how things are made.”
Freud seems finally to be throwing caution to the wind, at least selectively, and harnessing the full potential — comic and otherwise — of her famous surname. Her own (longstanding, male) therapist, she says, is of the view that “sometimes you just need to get over yourself”. It’s good advice, she says.
Her self-regard has been withering in the past, her body something of a battleground: “Self-criticism was so much more alive in my younger self,” she says. “I used to look at myself in the mirror and think, that bit’s OK, but that bit? Urrrrrrrrrgh!” These self-dissections made dressing herself a challenge, she says. Not any more.
“People go on about the fashion industry as undermining women’s confidence but [as designers] we’re there to do the opposite, to take care of people through our clothes,” she says.
In a conversation with her fellow fashion designer Rick Owens, the two sexagenarians agree that their life stage is no time for hiding under furbelows.
After all, their respective “assets” are in as good a state as they’re ever going to be. Allowing her studiously calm podcasting persona to slip for a moment, Freud is wide-eyed, quoting her recollection of a line from a favorite film, The Producers: “Work it, baby. Work it!”
Mark Smith is an Amsterdam-based freelance journalist and a contributing editor at The Gentlewoman magazine
