When designer Bella Freud launched Fashion Neurosis last autumn, where she asks interviewees to lie down while she delves into their psyches via questions about style, it was immediately a must-listen. Not only does the guestlist include the kind of best-in-class creatives who usually decline interviews (Zadie Smith, Kate Moss, Kim Gordon and Karl Ove Knausgaard have all appeared), but their fashion histories and habits quickly reveal more profound insights: how do they feel about their bodies? Who do they want to impress? How do they tune in to who they really are?
The episode with Bella’s longtime friend Trinny Woodall, founder and CEO of the make-up and skincare brand Trinny London, was one of her best, exploring how masculine and feminine dressing affect power dynamics for women. But as we’ve learned about the guests, we’ve also got to know Bella: not only as the designer who gives us hyper-cool jumpers, sharp trouser suits and the sexiest candles, but as a woman with thoughts on identity and the courage-bolstering abilities of a great outfit. Now, exclusively for Grazia, Bella takes to the couch herself, with pal Trinny as her psychoanalyst - read their conversation below...
Trinny: Hello Bella. How are you today?
Bella: I feel very soothed by your presence, actually. We have known each other for a very long time.
T: I feel an affinity too. I’m going to start with a basic question: how did you choose what you’re wearing?
B: Well, I put on my navy blue cavalry twill trousers, and this is my favourite jumper. I always feel like my brain works well when I’m wearing it.
T: The look I most identify you with is your black suit,white shirt and black tiewith pearls over it. What does that look mean to you?
B: It sort of encapsulates my whole life: my love of school uniform and the severity of punk. Then, depending on the shoe you wear with it, you can change the whole vibe. I tend to wear a trainer, or I wear a white sock and a very elevated shoe, like a platform. I like the boyishness of showing a bit of sock and ankle, and the fact that it seems unladylike.
T: As a teenager you started working for Vivienne Westwood at her punk shop in Chelsea, and later you became her assistant. Was it by accident that you ended up there?
B: No, the cool girls worked in her shop and I craved to work there. We were part of her tribe and we were ahead of the game. We would get weird looks in the street and I thought, ‘OK, that’s the right place to be.’ There was so much joy in watching her make clothes and then going out in them and telling her who responded well. I remember I had these fluorescent pink patent leather boots that I bought there, or maybe Vivienne gave them to me. One day I wore them with really baggy trousers and braces and I felt so cool. Later, my style evolved – I wanted to look like someone in a convent. I used to wear this blue pleated midiskirt and dark green suede boots and a grey Mickey Mouse jumper. I was living quite an unravelled life and I wanted to look as composed and inscrutable as possible.
T: I don’t think you and I ever just throw on clothes, because there’s something therapeutic about the art of getting dressed and deciding, ‘How is this making me feel?’
B: Yeah and ‘What do I need from my clothes today?’ Even if no one would notice, there is a whole process that’s gone on.
T: Do you ever go through that process and then go out and realise it isn’t working?
B: It doesn’t happen very often, but it did happen the other day. I went to a dinner party and I wore a shirt and tie when what I really wanted was to wear this jumper. When I got there, it was like having a stone in my shoe. It got on my nerves and I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t I follow my instinct?’ But I was adrift from my instinct when I was getting ready because I was feeling a bit insecure. I could probably wear the same clothes for the rest of my life, but I don’t want to settle into anything, ever. I don’t want to get too comfortable in life, and clothes are a way of moving myself forward.
T: Is that because you have a history of times when you maybe have got comfortable and then something was taken away?
B: Yeah, which is probably terrible. I don’t know if that feeling will ever go, but I’ve become better able to live with it.
T: How do you feel about your body?
B: As I get older, I appreciate it more, weirdly. I’ve got a really flattering mirror in my bathroom. It wasn’t on purpose, but it’s so helpful. I’m rarely naked in front of anyone, but sometimes I make the bed naked and I feel like, ‘Ooh, this is fun!’
T: Yeah – even in one’s own company, it’s a good feeling of being a bit naughty. When do you feel most feminine?
B: I think it’s to do with what type of shoe I’m wearing. If I’m in a high shoe that I really like, I’m compromised in my escape route, so I have this feeling that I’ll have to use some femininity to weather it.
T: I usually wear a heavy Prada boot or a trainer, but I wore a delicate boot yesterday and I could hear myself walking. When I heard that clippity-clop echo on the floor, it reminded me that I am a woman – and it made me softer.
B: I know what you mean and I find that, over the last 10 years, it’s become my ambition to be softer. I don’t want to be defended – that used to be a useful mode for me, but now I don’t want to be a ninja all the time. I’m trying to accept that maybe I don’t have to be ready to make a run for it.
T: What aesthetic do you like on other people that you’d never wear yourself?
B: I love a flimsy, barely-there dress. One of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen was my friend Susie Cave walking into The Ritz, wearing a short gold slip dress with a lace trim and high shoes. I thought, ‘Oh my God, that must feel great.’ A woman’s body is so lovely and I love the idea of something just suspended on it.
T: A Kate Moss moment?
B: Yes, but I couldn’t do it myself. I like to be covered up – it makes me feel sexier and like I have a few cards up my sleeve. I also love how Chloë Sevigny dresses. She is unafraid in a way that is much, much bigger than clothes. She doesn’t dress to be pretty but she is totally enchanting.
T: If you fancy someone, how do you want them to dress?
B: Oh my God… I find quite ordinary things sexy on a man. This morning I had a window cleaner coming and I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’ll be attractive.’
T: I love that that’s your first thought about the window cleaner.
B: Well, I’m more likely to find the window cleaner attractive than someone a bit more suave. A denim or khaki shirt makes me weak at the knees, whereas I think very self-conscious things get in the way.
T: Like a big gold cross?
B: Well, I’d quite like that.
T: Tell me your most profound dream.
B: My worst dreams are that I’m doing a fashion show and I don’t recognise any of the stuff coming down the runway, or I haven’t finished designing it and suddenly the show is happening anyway. Now those dreams are morphing: I’m supposed to be filming an interview for Fashion Neurosis but I don’t know who I’m interviewing. In another dream, I was playing bass in Patti Smith’s band, but I didn’t really know how, and she was looking more and more irritable. It was so awful.
T: Often our dreams are about feeling exposed or tapped on the shoulder and found out.
B: As a designer, I’m shaping things from behind the scenes, and that’s a good place. It’s much more nerve-racking to be visible. In my dreams, it’s my worst version of being seen, where I am totally fucking up. But there is a part of me that, of course, does want to be visible. You can never find out if you’re good at anything until you try it and that fear, if you allow it, can stop you trying. I think making Fashion Neurosis has satisfied a craving for me. There is a language that passes through clothes, that everyone can enjoy and relate to, and people are really responding to that. Fashion is a great prism and a fun thing, and not only for fashiony people.
T: Everyone has to get dressed in the morning and, to a greater or lesser extent, they’re thinking about how it’s going to make them feel.
B: Yes, and clothes can be such an ally. Certain things suit each person and we seem to operate better in them. I always like that story of Sir Walter Raleigh putting his cloak over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth I to walk on. Clothes can be that for any of us: they will carry us through.
