Freudian Fashion Theory

0:03Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Lauren Sherman, writer of Pucks Fashion and Beauty Memo line sheet. And today with me on the show is Bella Freud, fashion designer and host of one of my favorite podcasts, Fashion Neurosis. Happy Friday, everyone. I am in New York for a split second. Yes, it's cold. It's not as bad as I had anticipated, but let's see how I'm feeling when I fly back to Los Angeles on Sunday morning, where it's also in the fifties. So, you know, what's 30 degrees. Anyway, New York is the best, but it's also the most ridiculous. I went down to the dry cleaner by my hotel to get a pair of pants pressed.

0:43And the person at the front was like, we don't press anything. And if we did, it would take a week because everything we do goes to New Jersey and everything takes a week. I don't understand how that business works. You got to have quicker turnaround in the city, 24 hours, 48 hours. I'm willing to pay extra. Most people are best of luck to them operating that way. Luckily for me, because this is New York, I walked one more block and found a place that had 24 hour turnaround. This week on Line Sheet, we are busy. On Thursday, Rachel Strugez dug into the business of Kardashian beauty. Does she even know Kim Kardashian had a beauty line?

1:21Well, she does. She's had many. And Rachel has the numbers on this one's performance. She also checks in on Kylie cosmetics, which has, you know, been a journey and those results may surprise you. I wrote about the potential exit of ballet designer Simone Bilotti, which, you know, it sounds like he's moving on to greener pastures, but these pastures were pretty green, at least for us who love the line and, and happy to have them around for the March show. Sad to see him go excited to see what happens next. Sarah Shapiro did a very sharp business analysis of Yori, where she said if LinkedIn was a fashion brand, it would be Yori.

2:02Yes. I just want to say for all the people sending me feedback, I know Yori is popular. I understand why it's popular, especially among a certain set of people who really prize comfort above all else. I get it. What Sarah and I'd say by extension, and me are trying to figure out is how popular can it get? So they've raised over a billion dollars in funding and they have a valuation right now of$5.5 billion. That is definitely possible to achieve, but it's not easy. They don't have footwear like Nike. They don't have a real point of view. They have become, they're almost, I'd say you might want to compare them to Gap rather than another sports brand.

2:43They're almost the basics of this generation, but sans flair. The fashion statement is that there is no flair. Anyway, let's get going with the one and only Bella. I love her podcast. Please listen to it. It's really simple. Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Sheet. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. it's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries line sheet is scoopy analytical and above all fun along with me a subscription to puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment media sports politics finance the art world and much more if you're interested listeners of fashion people get a discount.

3:35Just go to puck.news slash fashion people to join puck or start a free trial. Bella Freud, welcome to Fashion People. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. What did you have for breakfast this morning? I have the same thing for breakfast every day, which I look forward to the same amount of pleasure. And I have black coffee with a piece of gluten-free toast and marmalade. And I love that breakfast more than anything. That sounds perfect. Are you celiac or do you just prefer gluten-free? I just prefer it. It suits me. My husband is celiac, so we have a lot of gluten-free. We've been on a long gluten-free journey.

4:25It's a great gluten. Same here. It's not as bad as it used to be. It used to be like eating dust, but now it's more tasty. Yeah. So I wanted to have you on the podcast because I've been listening to your podcast and I'm blown away. I love it so much. I don't listen to any other podcasts about fashion because it feels like homework for me. But I just am totally in love with it and I want to get into it, but I thought it would be interesting to hear a lot of people who listen to this are going to be big Bellafroid fans, but there will be people who don't know a ton about you. And I kind of wanted to explain how you became a fashion person.

5:09So I thought we could start with, you know, your life and, and where I think you grew up in London. Where did you grow up? Like, How did you end up becoming a fashion designer? I became a fashion designer. I went to fashion school in Rome when I was in my early 20s. And I didn't learn a lot there, but I used to go and visit tailors and shoemakers. And there was a lot of artisans still from the old days in Rome. And I used to just hang around and sort of see what distinguished ready to wear from sort of made to measure and all the secret code of how garment is constructed, how shoe is constructed.

6:00and all the stuff, all the snobbisms of the making of something, like when you have a cuff button that opens and what that means and why it's special and lots of things to do with interlining, which is very boring for non-fashion people. But when you're making things, how you can enhance the way something's made and how it lasts well and how you can make things look particularly distinguished. And it's all to do with like the shoulder pad and the canvas and how the internals work. And I suppose that's made me interested in the whole subject of fashion, and the internals of everything and how people sort of have a fantasy and an idea about what they want people to wear and how they get into people's souls, really, to love what the offering is.

7:11So I learnt a lot about that and all about the manufacture of things. then after that I went back to London and I worked for Vivian Westwood and I learned really a lot from her and how things worked really in terms of making something and having a show and then selling it and the production and that was in the late 80s. what made you going back to Rome what made you choose Rome versus going to I don't know if St. Martin's was I know in the 90s became the the fashion school but why did you why did you choose school in Rome in particular because there's so many different avenues you could have gone down I chose Rome because I was in love with someone who lived in Rome so sounds I moved there and I went to the school there.

8:14So that was the real reason. Do you think that that and the internals and the construction, I can see that in your work. To me, there's also something in your work that even though it's not flashy, there's an opulence to it, like a subtle opulence. Do you think that that was influenced by that time there? Or was that your natural aesthetic or way of expressing things. Yeah, it was influenced by that. And I think I saw that when things were really well made, that people seemed to shine more within it, that it gave them a kind of extra, like a fairy dust almost, that something's, I like the idea that you can wear a suit and that you can be like a 19th century poet and you can sleep in the, you know, along the side of the road on your journey to somewhere and you'll get up and dust it off and you'll still have a good edit.

9:15So if something's made well and the fabric is good, you can kind of wear it until it falls to bits and it still has that elegance. Yeah, it's a really great way to put it. What was it like working with Vivian Westwood? What you just said sort of flows into her work as well. Yeah, it was wonderful working for her because when I was a teenager, I worked in her shop seditionaries and there was nothing like it anywhere in the world. And I'd left school and I went and worked as a Saturday girl. And I just realized these clothes had so much power and influence. And if you were wearing them, it bestowed some of that on you.

10:01And it was the first time I really saw how important clothes were if you didn't have much confidence, like, you know, young people sort of struggling with their own sort of evolving of identity. and clothes could really give you this magic kind of, you know, this kind of garb of something that you didn't actually have within you and then you could live in and find out how to act in the world. That shop, when you were there, did it feel like the center of the world? Yeah, it really did. I mean, it was really intimidating to come into. It had these grills on the front. And I even remember one day sitting in there and seeing Debbie Harry walk past and look in.

10:53And I knew that she was thinking, oh God, I want to go in and I can't. I mean, I'm inventing that, of course. But it took a certain courage to walk into the shop. But once you were in, it was amazing. It's funny. Do you feel like it used to be more intimidating to walk into shops than it is now? Or do you think, yeah. Why do you think that is? I think there wasn't this feeling of trying to sell things like there is now. Like there's so much need for people to buy what you have and you have to do so much to woo your customer. Whereas in those days, there were these few places that people could go to.

11:40And if you had the courage to go through the door, especially if you didn't have much money, you would have to face down the snooty stairs of the staff who looked you up and down and thought, that person doesn't have any money to spend. You needed a kind of certain amount of confidence to face it out. Yeah. I also wonder, and this is maybe more of an American thing, but the way people dress day to day now where they'll like wear leggings and, and running gear into a fancy store with no problem. And, and also the, like you said, it's become more about selling. So the, it used to be that you'd walk in and maybe no one would say anything to you.

12:28And now everybody's like on you immediately and smiling and friendly. And you don't, you don't want to have that like pretty woman experience. Retailers don't want consumers to have the pretty woman experience where, where no one will, will help you. But it has, I mean, it's, it's just how like so much retail theater is gone now there. There aren't, it's not as much of an experience to go into most stores as it, as it used to be. It was so thrilling. I know it really was. And, you know, people would leave you alone a little bit more to kind of get familiar with what started to call to you in the shop.

13:11And you don't really get that chance so much now. And sometimes it just makes you want to rush out because everyone's being over conciliatory and trying to interest you in something. Yeah. How did you end up working there? Were you friends with people who worked there? Were you kind of in that scene? How did you land the Saturday? Because I'm sure the Saturday slot was coveted because that's when the most people go in. yeah I was friends with people who worked there and I was the youngest sort of in the scene and then I remember when I managed to get the jog and I was in this club in and Vivian was there and I'd recently cut my hair which had been really long and I'd cut it into a crop and she gave me this look and said oh cut your hair okay you know and I thought god great it's so exciting and and uh that's how I started and I did that I think I was 16 or something 16 or 17 and then um then after that when I moved to Rome in my early 20s when I was 22 Vidian had she was working in Italy with one of those big manufacturers yeah and we hooked up and she used to come and stay with me in Rome and I was at design school feeling really embarrassed to sort of even pretend to be being a designer with with her but she was very she was she'd been a teacher and she was very good at I wouldn't say encouraging because she wasn't really that type of person but I remember I was making something and she gave me some pointers And I took that as an encouragement.

15:10What did you learn from her when you went back and started working with her? Either things she taught you or just like observing her? I mean, what I really learned was because everything she did was so unseen, no one had ever done the things that she was doing. So I learned to see an idea and have confidence that it would work. Whereas sometimes she'd, you know, be proposing something or describing what she wanted to do. And I'd think, I can't really get this. I don't understand. But after a while, I started to wait for that moment when I would understand what she was doing. And my faith and belief in her was, it was a really exciting time to see, be working on something that you just couldn't entirely envisage and then when it came together it was just this kind of magnificent sort of explosion of beauty really it was and so she would ask me to go and find things and I'd go and look for stuff and I got kind of into going beyond what I thought was right and just being more, trying to be more adventurous and more imagining that this thing that maybe seemed to be nothing or hideous actually had something to it.

16:43And I always remember, she said, oh, I want to do a leopard print. Can you go and look for some? I'm going down this market. And the only one I could find was really ugly. And I just thought, okay, well, I'll take back a cutting. And I took it back to her and she said, that's fantastic. And I thought, great, you know, I couldn't see that. And then she blew that up and it became a print and she used it in lots of things. And I've still got the shirt that she gave me from that show. And so I had this real, you know, trajectory of how it came into being. And it really taught me to look further and see the possibility of him.

17:34What was London fashion like at that time? Was everyone, were all the different brands and the people who worked at the different brands sort of mixing together? And it feels like it was an incredibly transformative time for the industry. And a lot of that was coming out of the brands that were based there. Yeah, it was very, I mean, the thing about England at that time was the manufacturing was so limited. and most of the factories were set up to work with high street brands and do repetitions in huge quantities. So it was really hard to find people to work with who would develop things because people who started their own brands and their labels, it was more hand-to-mouth.

18:30But as a result, things were much more inventive. people had to literally make things themselves or the way things were constructed were not slick not you know like in the 90s we yeah in the late 80s she then had a manufacturer that backed her and there was just the polish of how things were produced was so different and they had all this experience and brought all this kind of Italian elegance to her her kind of defying of what was on trend and that that was just gorgeous we we were so proud I remember people in London we you know there was this obsession with wearing these things and feeling so full of swagger and like you were the best person on earth because you had a Vivian Westwood jacket and that was really a big deal it was really moving in those days it was great.

19:37What made you decide to break out on your own and when did you do that did you work for anyone else or did you did you go straight to do your own thing from there? Yeah I went straight I worked for Vivian for about three years and then I just thought I'll try doing something. You know, I had, I thought I'd start doing accessories so I made these little bags and some shoes and then I bumped into a knitwear. This man who owned a knitwear factory in Scotland, he said, oh, if you want to make some knitwear come up and so I drove to Scotland and worked with one of those factories where they were used to making v-neck sweaters for Marks and Spencer and they just hated what I was doing it was such a pain in the ass you know I remember the factory manager saying my wife's arm would never fit in that sleeve and thinking well it's not for her this is for this coquette girl that I have in my head.

20:45But I learned a lot. You know, I learned how to get things done. And I think with fashion, there are so many obstacles that every single turn, it's difficult to make something. And you just have to go on and on and on and be obsessed. And for some reason, I had that obsession and I just went on and on and on until I got something I like. How have you stayed in it for so long? Because you don't, the interesting thing, I think you mentioned this on the Jonathan Anderson interview, which I thought was, I mean, you're very good at pulling things out of people and every person that you interview is so comfortable with you.

21:28And that helps, I think, a lot as well. But I think on his or another one, you mentioned that at some point you just stopped doing fashion shows. How have you been able to just keep moving forward? And what have you done differently than maybe some of your peers or other people in the industry to be able to do that? Because you don't seem to be concerned with, as you just said about Vivian Westwood, following trends or any of that, or business trends even. Yeah, it was partly just circumstances. I think my main thing was that I never stopped, even when I had, there were times where I had no money at all.

22:09But I still made, I remember doing a collection. I'd really just made one sweater. Then I bumped into this journalist friend of mine and she said, oh, what are you working on? And I said, I've done a new collection. It's just one piece. and it just came out and I thought, yeah, okay. Instead of saying, oh, I've done nothing, I've got one sweater, in that moment I decided that was a collection and it took me through to the next stage. It was like crossing a river and there being an enormous gap between one stepping stone and the next. And I remember that that jumper was Ginsberg is God and for some reason I when I started my label I I made some short films I just thought oh I'll do this I had no idea how to make films I didn't know anything about it but I did it and I liked showing my work in in a film because I felt like I could had more I could mess about with the effect of it and I did then do shows and things and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as some people and then I decided to stop and started making some I made three short films though with John Malkovich I thought it would be so fun to to have an idea and to collaborate through someone else's visual point of view of it and see what comes out and so somebody introduced me to to John Malkovich and said he's really into fashion and I went to Paris and met him and first of all he said I just can't you know I don't have any time and then we just carried on and on chatting and then he suddenly said okay I'm gonna do it I've got one and a half days next month be ready and I was and we just had such a great time and that's that was one of the phases and I thought I'm just going to do the things I feel are my strengths and the things I've always loved and knitwear and tailoring so my idea of a collection is always about knitted the soft center and then the accessory is almost the tailored piece and so I've just refined my love of a suit and I love the boyish girl way of dressing and I find that very feminine And so I've just done that and I've never given up.

25:10You mentioned the factory in Scotland. How is observing, because you are a big knitwear designer, I'm sure that you've seen the trajectory of that industry. do you still produce anything there feel like recently Scottish cashmere and also just knits generally have come back into the conversation quite a bit and also just knits being being made in that area of the world uh do you make anything there and and what has it been like as you as your business has changed what has it been like to observe how those businesses have changed and i'm sure some of them have gone away and or sure a lot of a lot of the factories shrunk or closed down and then exactly as you described this sort of shift happened and then I think there were so many more designers and then the high street became interested in design.

26:26Instead of copying people, they employed designers. So the whole quality of what they were producing was much better, more interesting. And then it was possible to start doing certain things with Scottish mills. And it depends on what kind of machinery they have. And people are very dismissive about things made in China, but there's a whole world of hand, not handmade, but hand-laid machines that they still have in China. And these people were really expert at, especially for my stuff where I use a lot of words on my knits. And in Scotland, they don't have those machines. And if they do, it costs a fortune.

27:15Whereas in China, you have these really skilled people. And a lot of it's also to do with like building relationships. And I met this agent who, they were just so helpful and facilitating, you know, how to make something and how to make it feel good and finish. And a lot to do with those friendships with certain people that I work with there. and you start to know each other and they know what you like and you ask if you can try this. It's like when I first started working in Italy how there was this eagerness and this interest in producing something that was difficult and how to figure that out.

28:07And that's beginning to revive in the UK now where there's the kind of this meeting of wanting to help each other instead of everyone used to be, if you say you were a designer, someone's fate, they'd be like, oh, God, designers are a nightmare because we always want it to be better or different or can you do this or make it like that. and that's improved a lot here. The kind of, I think people, the manufacturing industries can see more what's, that there's a real good relationship to be had with designers and how we can all benefit from a little more flexibility. What is the most popular jumper you've ever done?

29:01Is it the 1970 one or? Yeah, it's that still. Why do you think that's been so just, it feels eternal now? It's funny. I think there's something about it that it suits a lot of people. And it's, even if someone doesn't really think about that, I mean, the date is just something I, it was a random thing. it was just the date in the corner of a catalog that I was looking through. And then even for people who were born, you know, in 2000s or whatever, it has an association that they don't necessarily know what it is, but it feels like it relates to something. And I think it, for me, I feel like it, I get a lot of ideas There's some record sleeves and album covers and T-shirts and protest posters and things people carry in a protest or that they wear on a march so that they're very instant.

30:13And I think it has something about that too. And the white stripe, it's flattering to the face. And I've also been quite, I mean, I do variations and I do use it on various things, but not on everything. I feel quite protective of it. So first of all, I only did a black jumper and I really didn't ever want to do anything more than a black jumper with this white stripe. and my sales agent said, please, can we just have one color that is how many black jumpers can someone buy? And I thought, okay, I understand it. But each time I do a different color or a different type of yarn, it feels very thoughtful.

31:04I'm very careful and I hope that that runs through And even though I have a selection, it's not everywhere. It's still a precious thing. It feels very collectible. And I'm sure there are people who have every single one or they have this edition or that edition. And it definitely feels special. I mean, all of your work does. I love the jumper you're wearing right now. It's really great. it's green and black stripe with like a little mock neck it's really good oh yeah i've got another sweater you do oh yeah it looks called this is a mohair sweater so i i love mohairs well that's a sort of throwback from the punk days when people love mohair that Reminds me of Kirk Hogan.

31:59Yeah.

32:05So tell me about the podcast and why you decided to do it and the concept, because you have a very famous last name and you're interviewing people as if you're in a therapy session and the person's lying on the couch, which I love. I wonder if it changes the way they speak because they're lying back the way you have the microphone pointed towards them. But tell me about it. Well, I thought I'd been thinking for years about how to write about what happens in the fashion world and all the things that happen backstage and behind the scenes and the getting an idea to be its own thing and to exist in a garment.

32:57and there's so much fun in there and people are so funny and there's all these kind of shortcuts and codes in the language and all this intimacy and I wanted to find a way to describe it somehow and then, and I'd always wanted to, I started off thinking that I wanted to do a chat show, but I wanted it to be almost like, I'd seen these videos of Allen Ginsberg at the Albert Hall in the 60s, and there was just this granular feeling about it that made you want to know more, to be able to hear with the bad sound and just to find out what are they talking about. And also some of the poems you just think, I don't know, is that really deep and meaningful or is it rubbish?

34:00And there is an aspect of fashion which is a bit like that. But in the end, the clothes themselves have to be, you know, totally convincing. And with the couch, I was thinking when I was first sort of messing about doing little setups and stuff, I thought, okay, if someone lies on the couch and I'm in the chair, people will recognize it, hoping that fashion neurosis maybe would take off and I could like travel around the world interviewing people. So I thought, okay, this is my prop. And obviously, it's a kind of tongue-in-cheek play on the sort of situation of lying on the couch with a psychoanalyst.

34:52Do you want to briefly explain your background so I don't have to do an expository at the top, like who your family is and why the analyst couch makes so much sense? Well, yeah, my great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud. And then my father, who was the person I was looking to for all my kind of influence he was a painter busian freud and he never really talked about sigmund freud at all and once i asked him about him and he said he was very funny so i thought great you know i like the idea of that and i have to confess i haven't actually read I've read half of Interpretation of Dreams. And then the things I've read about him, I read a comic book, a graphic novel, and that was great.

35:53And I sort of got the measure. And I also thought, someone's going to do this. So I'll do it. And then I find that something does seem to happen when people lie on the couch. people do seem open to just talking and and I also wanted to have this overhead camera so it felt like you're looking into their thought process and the fact that when someone's lying down and they're looking up they're not looking at me so there's not they're not trying to figure out what I'm going to say or whether the conversation's over. There was something Jonathan Anderson said to me. He said, it's interesting because I can't see your eyes or your lips.

36:49I can't do the thing that normally happens in a conversation where you stop or you just wait for the other person. And I find I'm listening carefully to when I say something or maybe I might interrupt someone occasionally. But some mysterious thing seems to happen that makes for a very kind of close conversation. and I find I say things as well that I didn't necessarily anticipate I'd say but because I have questions that I prepare but I also like to see where we can go within those questions and sometimes I don't ask all the questions or they'll start saying something that I was already going to ask them about and we go on a bit of a tangent.

38:00And it's exciting. What has guided who you end up having on? Because you've had a lot of designers on. I haven't listened to the Rick Owens one yet. I've listened to Zadie Smith, Jonathan, Kristen Scott Thomas, which was truly amazing. And I love listening to you two talk about film and fashion inspiration and cinema and also how she works with the costume designers and all of that. But it's a mix of people. It seems like a lot of people that you have relationships with, but you have had quite a few designers. They seem very open because you're a peer, but what is driving the people that you're choosing to bring on?