Bella Freud - Learning To Trust Herself

0:00Celebrity doesn't guarantee any success in design because it has to be good. I was called fruid, fiend, fraud quite a lot. I mean, in some ways, I think if I had joined the circus, I might still be in it. And then at a certain point, I just thought, no more psychics. I realised probably around 10 years ago or more, what's going to happen is what I make happen. So get on with it. Welcome to How To Fail. This is the podcast where we take failure, we flip it on its head, and we consider it something to learn from rather than something to feel shame over. Before we get into this particular episode, please do remember to follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.

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2:46After you sign up, they ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that our show sent you. Go to Rula.com, that's R-U-L-A dot com slash H-T-F and take the first step towards better mental health today. You deserve quality care from someone who cares. Since establishing her eponymous label in 1990, the designer Bella Freud has created in multiple forms, from clothing to interiors to perfume making, films and podcasting. In doing so, she has redefined what it means to be a modern designer. Her playful clothes, the iconic 1970 jumpers, the masculine tailoring with an elegant twist have garnered a loyal following from the likes of Zadie Smith, Kate Moss and Little Sims And now her podcast, Fashion Neurosis, has become a cult hit featuring weekly guests lying on a couch being interviewed by Freud about what clothes mean to them Everyone from Cate Blanchett to Nick Cave has been asked about their sartorial inclinations.

3:58It's a witty nod to Freud's own heritage. Her father was the artist Lucian, her great-grandfather the psychoanalyst Sigmund. Freud's childhood was one of emotional flux and financial uncertainty. She was one of Lucian's 14 children with different women, and when she was six, her mother took her and her younger sister Esther to Marrakesh on the Hippie Trail, experiences later recounted in Esther's book Hideous Kinky. At 16, Freud moved to London and ended up working for Vivian Westwood in the 1980s, where her fashion apprenticeship started. Freud was a frequent sitter for her artist father until his death in 2011.

4:42Of this experience, she has said. Sometimes I'd watch him being really turbulent, the painting not going well, or maybe something else was going on in the background, but I'd see him go on doing it. I think that was the best, most useful thing I've ever learned. Bella Freud, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you, Elizabeth. It's so lovely to be sitting opposite you. I apologise for not having a couch. you are upright in the seated armchair um I really really adored that quote you gave about sitting for your father why do you think it was the most important thing you learned seeing him in the struggle but continuing I think because certainly in fashion or really in anything there are always challenges and the success is to to be tenacious to persist but I think watching him not abandon the work that was something that went in somewhere and my tendency you know I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to you know change subject and uh but I realized that's the worst thing I could do.

6:01And often, even when I'm in the middle of something that's going well, I think I'll just go and make the bed or do something else because it's so tempting to leave. But the key is to stay and finish, and then the whole level of reward is so much greater. Your father drew the Bellafroid logo. is your designing in a way a means of being in conversation with him still what I like is to think that he's somehow in everything or on everything because his the logo he drew I turned into all sorts of you know an embroidered little dog or printed and knitted it's there all over the place and I liked the feeling that somehow his art which couldn't be more further away from fashion so I often go through his books and think oh there must be something I can somehow appropriate in some form and the only thing that really works as a design is a thing that he did for me as a design.

7:25And it's nice to have him there. Your podcast is this wonderful and unique thing. How has it been for you? Has it taught you something about yourself, the act of asking other people what clothes mean to them? Well, I've always known that that was what I was interested in, how the power of clothes and and I noticed how designers weren't ever asked about the background to it or anything to do with how our work as a designer any nuance to it or any depth or sort of it's always the same thing and because fashion's more visible in reality tv there's still a sense of if you watch enough tv you'll end up on tv but the the making aspect is still a vagary and you see people like drawing or sticking things together but it's like watching blue peter there isn't you don't see the the pros i hate that word the process but the process is so enormous and it changes all the time I really believe that people were more interested and influenced by what they wear than they even know and that if they knew they would find that kind of fascinating how frustrating then do you find it because you and I have spoken in the past about how hard it is to run a design business and how much graft it requires so how frustrating is it if you see someone like Molly May Haig releasing like a celebrity releasing a fashion line I don't should would I say Victoria Beckham in this context I don't know would I is it frustrating uh I just think oh god good luck to you you know it's a hard business and celebrity doesn't guarantee any success in design because it has to be good has to be wearable if there isn't something in it then it doesn't mean a thing and i mean i i've no idea who molly what's her name is molly mayhay there's there may be some good ideas in the beginning but it's when you go on that you have to have a vision you have to have the next stage and the next stage and that's more than ever you know it's so hard it's hard enough for designers who have made their whole world about the story that goes on and on and the identity and the handwriting I don't have any um cynicism but it doesn't particularly go in any and when someone does it well like Victoria Beckham did you know certainly in her start you felt that's really reflects this part of you that we haven't seen and it's really cool yeah and I like I love what you say there because being creative is artistic, but it's also a craft.

10:55It's also about building the wall and putting one brick on top of the other. And I feel like that about writing books as well. And just to answer your question, Molly Mayhag was a runner up one season of Love Island, which I'm not, I'm imagining is not regular viewing in the Freud household. I probably should, but I haven't. On Fashion Eurosis, you ask your guests certain repeat questions. And one of them is always, what are you wearing today and why did you choose it? So I'd like to ask you that question. And then I'd like to ask myself that question. Yeah. What are you wearing today, Beth? Well, I probably should have thought more that this was also filmed because I was thinking about my brain and talking to you.

11:41And I decided to wear tailoring because I like tailoring and it makes me feel a bit more engaged as a professional. And it's really cold, and I feel the cold a lot. And I wore this white turtleneck. I love a turtleneck. And then a dark jumper. This one has Bored and Beautiful written on. Every now and then I realise I need some new clothes. And luckily I've made some. Go and make them. You are one of the coolest dressers I know. And you create clothes that I absolutely love. The amount of pockets that you put into garments is a sort of radical act of feminism, I think. and I'm wearing a 1970 Bella Freud top that is one of my favourite items of clothing and it has a whole history behind it.

12:40So it was the first piece of Bella Freud that I owned and I asked my ex-husband for it when we were married for Christmas one year. So he got me this top. It's, I think, the only item I have kept from that marriage. But I couldn't let it go, Bella. and it still carries such good energy for me despite the end of that relationship and I wear it when I want to bring colour into my outfit but not in a way that feels overly aggressive yeah and I wore it here's the twist I actually wore this top on the day that I met my now husband how amazing and it was partly because i'd been to see a psychic who had said you need to wear more color because i was going through a phase of sort of beiges and yeah and i still had this top and the next day i had this date with this guy from hinge i was like okay i'll wear my favorite colorful top and i met justin wearing this wow so thank you that's so interesting the the idea that clothes would stay in the past in a past relationship and not in not follow through and that this was the one that was the bridging definitely yeah I like that because I think I dressed in a different way when I was in my first marriage for various psychological reasons which we don't need to get into because this podcast is actually not about me it's about you but I did want to do that and to say thank you for making the clothes that you do let's get onto your first failure, which is being late.

14:17Yes. Tell me how you started being late. Where does your relationship with lateness stem from? God, well, I remember asking my shrink why I'm late. And he said, I think it's a love test because the whole process of being late is having this plan to meet someone being late having this disastrous adrenalized journey arriving wondering if they'll still be there they're there and winning them back and then realizing how demoralized you demoralizing it is and how i i noticed the pattern of this thing and and also thinking if i leave now i could have 10 minutes more work which i didn't normally do or what a waste of time to be on time was some sort of awful subliminal thing that kept me being late and my mother used to be late for me every time and it got worse and worse and worse and I hated it so much and my father was really punctual one of my extreme latenesses was I'd asked I'd managed to get Lord Rothschild to give me an hour of his time for business advice and this was maybe 20 years or 30, I don't know.

16:04Anyway, maybe it was the beginning around 2000 and I arrived an hour late and his face was just like this smile of absolute derision and I had five minutes left. Did you have a chance to say anything? I wished he'd not seen me at all. I had really abused something that was on offer and it sort of was hitting me what I'd done in this ridiculously kind of self -sabotaging act. It was a really bad moment, but it was good that he saw me because I felt really bad and that's exactly what I should have felt. I messed something up badly. It was just shocking how little power I seemed to have over this thing that I had total power over.

17:12And then somehow or other, it started to change, and I got less late, and then I got invested. I suddenly saw the kind of fun of being on time, and now I'm punctual. And sometimes I'm early and I absolutely love it because I have total agency. I realized I was so addicted in a way to the winning of things that I created this scenario in my life where I had to double prove myself by nearly losing the thing I wanted and then seeing if I could just grab it back. and it was a sort of horrible buzz. That is fascinating. And as you're talking, it's as though I can feel how upsetting those experiences were for you of extreme lateness.

18:11And actually what I'm hearing is potentially someone who didn't feel she was worth another person's time and that internal narrative being confirmed again and again. And I'm interested in whether that version speaks to you. I mean, it was both a kind of abjectness and an arrogance, because there were people that I felt like, you know, if I'm late, I don't care. And that was fairly sort of unrewarding in itself. It's an incredibly aggressive thing to do. so it's all mixed up in that sense of am i worth it and then the ordinariness of being on time creates this massive universe which i have access to because it's so there's so much work it's like you know being miserable is a full-time job and it was an element of that The ordinariness of being on time.

19:21What a phrase. I want to come back to it. But I'm very aware of the intimidation I feel talking to Sigmund Freud's great granddaughter. and I'm now about to say something which Freud would be rolling in his grave over. But how much of this do you think stems from your childhood, Bella? In terms of the chaos that I mentioned in the introduction of the inconsistency of your mother, and I say that with love, but being trailed off to Morocco at such an early age and experiencing periods of abandonment and never knowing whether someone not only was going to be on time, but be there at all. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and those experiences and how they shaped you?

20:13Everything sort of comes from that. And my sister Esther is very punctual. She's like my father and always a bit early. And I often feel that we're the flip side of the same coin she's early I'm late but it's for similar reasons of control I used to be very very sort of focused and disciplined as a child and made all these weird tests for myself and then when I got to puberty they suddenly turned and I became chaotic i created chaotic systems in my life and was self-destructive and that felt like my agency but it was of course the world became very tiny i do think it it does come from that i think when i was very young i managed life because it was essential I knew how to cook when I was six and seven and I knew what to look out for I knew what was dangerous so I was on red alert the whole time and then I just switched into this messiness and being late came from that I think it was your rebellion I think so yeah because Because there was a period of time where your mother left you for several months with strangers.

21:47Yeah. When I was in Morocco, she went to Algeria and I said, oh, I don't want to come. And that was that. It was never revisited and we never talked about it ever. It was just off the table. and so she went to Algeria and there was no phone, I didn't know where she was and she didn't know where I was because the couple who I stayed with, they said they wanted to go traveling and I said I'm not coming. But they did organize for me to stay with somebody in Marrakesh and then I didn't like it there and I ended up staying with this woman who ran a, she was a nurse and she ran a, had a little place where children who'd had polio would, she would do rehabilitation.

22:44They lived there. And then eventually she said, why don't you just come here? And bizarrely, I go to Pilates and I have been doing so for 25 years. And there was this young man there who was teaching in the studio and he was her son who hadn't been born then because when I met her she was only in her early 20s everyone was so young and I was seven and then yeah my mother came back and found me there it was a weird time and I think it created a bit of a gulf between us. And I was sort of horribly aware of how vulnerable my mother was, a young woman alone in Morocco. And because I spoke and understood Arabic.

23:37And so I could hear what people said about us. And I mean, people were so kind to us. They were amazing. But I was much more aware of the danger of wandering around knowing nothing, you know.

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25:35When did that change occur? about 10 years ago. It's quite a while now. But I remember noticing, and it was like watching a dial, you know, an oxygen dial go up, thinking, God, oh, this is kind of exciting. This thing is happening, and I seem to be arriving almost on time, and this thing that felt like it evaded me was suddenly within my means to see how I could get it to the next stage. And then I find now that I get ready to leave with time to arrive there. Whereas before I just constantly mismanaged, I sort of fantasized it would take me 10 minutes to get from Labbrook Grove to Hoban or whatever, because maybe it could.

26:36and uh and now i don't do that and i it just gives me such a kick so what was happening for you 10 years ago that prompted this do you think i did this thing called emdr which um i sort of did it for something else that just haunted me and just wouldn't go away in spite of all the other therapy I'd done. And that really had a good effect on me. And I noticed it seemed to sort of, these catches went off in other areas of my life. This decision making process improved dramatically. And that was one of the outcomes. So EMDR is eye movement desensitizing reprogramming, something like that. It's the tapping thing, isn't it?

27:37Well, it's different things. What it does is it does with the eye movement, it changes your fight, flight and freeze responses, your neural patterning. and then I sort of had the sense of the charge was slightly going out of it yeah it was really sort of mysterious but very effective and I when I went for my first meeting with this practitioner when I came out I felt like I was going to faint I felt so I could I felt like I had an enormous 20 stone man sitting on my chest and taking away my breathing ability my kind of panic could feel it there and it took me a while to go back and then when I went back we did this thing and and it was over some months I felt things changing And the thing that I'd specifically gone for, which haunted me, and I thought about intermittently every day, 20 times or more, it was like a Bermuda Triangle that gradually closed.

29:01Wow, that's so powerful and so fascinating that eyes, ears, of course, these are sensations that take in so much and carry so much. Yeah. that aren't necessarily easily accessed. I'm so glad it worked for you. Can I also ask you, because both your parents died in 2011, is that right? Within a month or so. Within a week. Within a week of each other. My father was dying of cancer and we were all expecting him to die. And then a week before he died, my mother went into hospital for some tests and she'd come and stayed with me, which she didn't do very often, but she'd been to stay with me a few months earlier and said she'd forgotten her painkillers and she wasn't someone who took painkillers.

29:54And I noticed that and thought, God, that's strange. And she said, I've had some pain in my back or something. She went into hospital, they did some tests and then they said, you've got a week to live. And she did die a week later and my father died on July 20th and she died on 24th. So it was so, so strange. That must have been horrendous. Yeah, it was so abstract that it, and in a way, because she was, she knew she was going to die and this doctor had told her exactly what, you know, what would happen and it was very it seemed to be very peaceful and I remember and also it made it possible to to ask her things or say things like ask her if she had a will um say things like I'm gonna miss you and not and that was completely normal I remember saying that to her and she said I feel strangely detached from what's happening to me it was kind of wonderful in a way because there's nothing I mean I don't suppose anyone else would want a long prolonged death but her more than anyone she was very immediate person and she'd had she they discovered she had cancer in three places and it was completely everywhere you know we made our peace and I thought we were going to be at the beginning of some other phase in our lives of begrudging acceptance of each other and we sort of were and then she that was it she was gone it was like a racehorse an outsider horse streaking to the front and and and she said um oh i'm sorry i'm just sorry I won't be able to come to dad's funeral and then we just laughed and it was it was great in in some ways you know even though it was unbelievably shocking I'm so sorry for what you and Esther must have gone through at that time did you have an opportunity to say to either of them I love you or were you not that kind of family I did say to my father once I'd done some sort of self-help course and and i said oh this is the bit where i tell you i love you and we just laughed and i think it it's it was really nice and i'm sure he appreciated that and i tried that a bit with my mother and in a way it was more about gestures and i was so glad that she'd come to stay with me because we kind of wound each other up.

32:54And we had a really nice, she stayed for two or three nights and we had a really nice time together. And I remember we went, because she lived in Suffolk and we went to the Latitude Festival and we went to see Nick Cave and then we went to see Blondie. and when we were sort of rocking out, we looked at each other and I thought, yeah, this is, you know, this is where we're... She just was like a rebellious teenager her whole life and when I was together with her in that, we got on really well. And we had things out and some were successful and some much less so. I suppose on... There was some kind of acceptance of each other before she died, which was a peaceful thing.

33:52Did your father say, I love you back? No, I don't think so. He didn't really use that language, but he showed it in many ways. So that didn't matter at all. I wasn't, I was, my intention was to say something that was potentially embarrassing, but I wanted him to know anyway. And so he knew. Well done you for your courage in navigating your relationship with your mother. Your second failure, Seamless Link, is not joining the circus. Oh God, yes. So was this actually an opportunity? Yeah. Okay. Tell me this story. I think I was 19 and I was going through a phase of trying to be an actress or vaguely entertaining, like being in a band or being an actress, being a performer of some kind.

34:53And I used to get the stage and look at the adverts and I saw there was an advert for something or other. I don't know if it's said anyway I went for this meeting and it was in the middle of Shepherd's Bush Roundabout where there was a circus and I was going for a job it transpired of being the girl that dances on a ball you know when they'd have an enormous ball there would be someone who somehow stayed on it and I went for the audition and I got the job and then wait so in the audition did you have to stand on the wall no she just sort of checked me out how old were you I was 19 okay 18 or 19 it was the first part of the job I'd have to go and live in Birmingham in a caravan on the side and I wouldn't be paid for anything at all no living costs no food and then after a month I think or it was it I would then get my living costs and then when I was in the circus I would get a sort of minimum wage and I just didn't do it and I stayed home and I always regretted it and I actually I mean in some ways I think if I had joined the circus I might still be in it.

36:21So in some ways, I'm glad I didn't do it because my life took me in a different direction. And it was one of my fantasies as a child to be in the circus. I loved all the people in it. I always loved people in that type of world and outside, you know, an outsider life with a lot of pride. And it's something that I still think, oh God, You know, I wimped out. You do look like you'd be a great addition to any circus. I mean that as a compliment. Yes, no, I take it as that. You mentioned there that when you were younger, so sort of six, you were the one who felt you had to be responsible in the absence of adult responsibility.

37:09Yeah. And then in your teenage years, that switched. And I wonder how that affected your relationship with your younger sister, Esther, if at all. Yeah, no, it did. Because when we were children, she was the person I trusted. And I don't know if it's an oldest child syndrome that she was so important to me, but I also felt like, you know, I was looking out and she was behind me. so she gave me this moral support but I was the the soldier at the on the front line and I I mean whether I was or not is neither here nor there but it's and I don't know if other eldest children have that feeling of slight loneliness of we're the ones we also get the love because we're the first one but then we lose it and we get the first we're the ones that are the experimenters as it were she just was such a great ally and she always believed in me and believed me more than anything and you know as a teenager people are it's the time where you get dismissed and very much so in the 70s um and she believed me and that was such a big thing i was always grateful and still am for that yes what's it like today that's more important than ever there's some kind of thing in some i can't remember how it exactly goes about resilience and it's something to do with trauma when it's not witnessed is a catastrophe but trauma when there is some sort of witness i.e someone believes what happened to you makes it much easier to recover from and when your experience is denied it's just this kind of you can get stuck in this thing for your whole life of proving or just disappearing because what everyone saw you're being told didn't happen to have that information so that it's not dismissed and notice it in other people thank you it's so rare I think that we talk about sibling relationships and it's rare on this podcast too and I really value having the chance to talk about it as one of two sisters myself and I'm the younger sister and I completely agree with you by the way I was so grateful to my older sister Catherine for being the experimenter the kind of bulwark the first defense um and it's a it's just a very interesting relationship that completely shapes who we are and our character yeah and i really appreciate how much attention you pay to family when you do your podcast fashion neurosis you do it sitting on a chair that was your father's chair in his studio this sort of battered beautiful painterly armchair and of course the act of what you're doing is psychoanalytical as your great grandfather was the founding father of it.

40:47And I just wonder what your relationship is with the Freud name. My whole relationship was with my father. He never talked about his grandfather. There was no reference, hardly at all. He made a few jokes about him. And it was really about what you do yourself and he was the model for that so we didn't we didn't use that as a kind of blanket I felt that would be a bit tacky to just you know in the end if I don't do a good job of whatever it is I'm doing then who cares what I if I then use that as some sort of magic carpet that's the worst thing I can imagine so we were never brought up with a thing about Freud at all but my father there he was he was everything to me and I just what you know he was just such a powerful person in my life and he was and I looked up at him and how he dealt with life and he seemed to deal with life by painting through any problems and also when I was growing up no one had heard of Freud apart from intellectuals so when I was a child it was just an unpronounceable name for a really long time and then clement freud was on tv he did these adverts for dog food and uh and he was on just a minute wasn't he or yeah but yes but when we were growing up we didn't have a tv so sometimes people would say oh something about it and i that seemed quite exciting that someone we were related to that we didn't know was on TV.

43:00And then also my father's paintings, people were quite freaked out by them. When I was younger at school, no one knew what it meant. I was called fruid, fiend, fraud quite a lot. And then when I moved to Italy when I was 22, everyone was obsessed with Freud and that was quite funny I remember the man in the dry cleaner saying oh can you tell me I just thought it was hilarious by that time I'd got much more you know I realized that it was really down to me if I was gonna be ambitious for making my way in the world. It's got to be about being good at my work.

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45:01Give big, save big with Rack Friday Deals at Nordstrom Rack. For a limited time, take an extra 40 % off Red Tag Clearance for a total savings up to 75 % off. Save on gifts for everyone on your list from brands like Vince, Cole Haunt, Sam Edelman and more. All sales final and restrictions apply. The best stuff goes fast. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today. Have you ever been to a psychic or a clairvoyant who has communicated with Sigmund? No, I did used to go to psychics all the time. And now I'd never go to one again because I would sort of, instead of thinking what should I do I'd see what they thought I should do and I often do it you know ridiculous stupid things always to do with romantic relationships like when they were obvious red flags and I think but they said this was the one or something and then at a certain point I just thought no more psychics but um I remember I remember going to this medium who actually gave me some quite brilliant advice but so I went back again and she said oh your grandfather's trying to communicate I mean this wasn't Sigmund this was my father's father he said I think he likes ice cream and I thought okay that's enough well I wonder if you stopped seeing psychics around the time that you stopped being late yeah you felt yeah you had your own agency again I realized I was just deferring you know kind of giving my intelligence to someone else instead of using it and I have no temptation whatsoever now and it's much more exciting actually like that instead of waiting for this thing that doesn't really quite make sense you know that thing of I wonder what's going to happen I realized probably around 10 years ago or more what's going to happen is what I make happen so get on with it stop messing around with all this rubbish I mean I don't not believe in it but I don't want to be part of that anymore I love that for you your final failure is another near miss it sounds like so we go from the circus to um auditioning for bow wow wow with malcolm mclaren so to bring the listener and the viewer up to speed you have not joined the circus but you did get a job with vivian westward yeah and you ended up as her assistant so it doesn't date from this time in your life those are 20s yeah it because i first worked for vivian in her shops, editionaries, when I was about 17.

47:50And then I left and I did other stuff and lived in other places. And when I came back, Malcolm said, asked me if I wanted to audition. And I was trying to be, I played music and I'd always played, I always played music. And, but I, I remember going to this audition and Bow Wow Wow were amazing. And they had all had a fight and Annabella had left, I think. She's a lead singer. Yeah. She was, and I'd seen her, I'd seen them play and they were so amazing. And I remember going, and sometimes Malcolm would sort of take me up or he did take me up and he sent me for singing lessons. and I went to this audition, I remember feeling really not at my best, and like I, a bit groggy, and there was another girl there, this gorgeous girl called Pearl, and I sang with them, and she sang with them, and then they all huddled around her, and I thought, this isn't going very well, and it was really, really embarrassing.

49:15I felt so embarrassed. But in a way, it's good to go through extreme embarrassment. It doesn't matter that much. And I knew it didn't work. I knew I wasn't right. But I'm glad I tried because this whole thing about failure, of course, is that you can fail and try again. is a really important thing because you realize you're not going to die of shame or about it's good experience and it kind of makes you more conscious of what you can or can't do and but what I didn't know at the time was that just wasn't my time to be a performer and I became a designer where I felt comfortable being behind the scenes and shaping things embarrassment is such an interesting sensation because I think a bit like you were saying with fashion at the beginning it can often be dismissed as trivial or absurd or funny and actually I think it can go incredibly deep.