Beauty Bible Loves... Bella Freud's Fashion Neurosis podcast
There are so many podcasts out there – how to choose? Well, we suggest taking a short-cut straight to Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast. To call it ‘brilliant’ doesn’t really do it justice.
Fashion designer Bella taps into her seriously impressive Little Black Book for her podcast, in which – like her grandfather Sigmund Freud – she literally puts guests on a couch and asks them to share their deepest thoughts. Fashion and clothes are the starting points, but since all of us have so many memories around clothes, and we use them to – literally – fashion the identity that we share with the world, it’s such a clever portal to the inner life.
Having first listened to her session with British artist and stage designer Es Devlin (who we became fangirls of when she designed an installation for Chanel in – of all places – Peckham), we are now catching up with the entire back catalogue.
From the beauty world, on Bella’s couch just the other day was hairstyling superstar and our old friend Sam McKnight, who shared some riveting insights with his long-term client and buddy, the late Princess Diana – alongside memories of Molton Brown on South Molton Street (then the coolest hair salon in London), wearing platform shoes, Lady Gaga and much, much more.
We’ve also caught up with the sessions with model and The Vampire’s Daughter fashion designer Susie Cave, and an episode with the writer Hanif Kureishi, whose moving insights into his post-accident life (he was paralysed when fainting in his girlfriend’s flat in Rome, a few years back), completely FLOORED us. But there are also sessions with Gwendoline Christie, Kristen Scott Thomas, Nicky Haslam – we can’t wait to listen to them all.
Her questions are so thoughtful, ditto her responses to her guests’ revelations. Bella is someone who truly thinks before she speaks, and we truly admire her for that.
Fashion Neurosis is available everywhere you get your podcasts – but what also makes this different and even more fascinating is that the ‘patients’ are filmed directly by a camera above the couch, adding a whole new dimension to the podcast experience. (Albeit you’ll have to watch it on a screen, rather than listening on a phone or radio.)
Her grandfather would be proud. (And we hope Bella is, of herself.)
The Fashion Neurosis podcast is here
The Fashion Neurosis YouTube channel is here
