Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud

Celia Paul is a British painter.

Born in India, Celia returned to England in the 1960s, moving to London to study at the Slade School of Art, aged 16, where she met Lucian Freud. They began a relationship that lasted ten years and led to the birth of their son, Frank. Paul frequently sat for Freud, and appears in many of his notable works including Girl in a Striped Nightdress and Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau).

Paul's work mines the complexities of interior and exterior life, looping back and forth through time to the people and...

Simone Rocha is an Irish designer. 

Born in Dublin, the daughter of designer John Rocha, she graduated with a BA in Fashion from The National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2008, continuing in 2010 to graduate from the acclaimed Fashion MA at Central Saint Martin’s College, London. 

Simone debuted at London Fashion Week in September 2010, and has shown at every season since, in some of London’s most historically significant buildings such as Tate Modern, The Royal Academy of Art, Southwark Cathedral, The Old Bailey, and Alexandra Palace. 

In October 2024 Simone Rocha r...

Nathaniel Mary Quinn is an American artist.

Born and raised in Chicago, Quinn began drawing at an early age, and went on to receive an MFA from New York University in 2002 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana in 2023. 

Quinn’s practice operates within a world of visual metaphor, in which identifiable forms and features are mobilized to reveal aspects of character. Memories and found images unite to form composite portraits that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter.

His fir...

Grace Coddington is a British fashion editor, stylist, and model.

After winning a Vogue model competition in 1959, Grace pursued a modelling career in London and Paris. Landing a job as Junior Fashion Editor at British Vogue in 1968, she worked under the legendary Bea Miller, and then as Fashion Director under a young Anna Wintour. Lured to New York by Calvin Klein in 1986 to be his design director, she was invited back to Vogue when Anna Wintour took over as Editor in Chief of American Vogue in 1988. Coddington worked as Creative Director at American Vogue until 2016. 

G...

Blindboyboatclub is an award-winning Irish author, documentary‐maker and podcaster.

As a writer, he has published three collections of best-selling and critically-acclaimed short stories, blending myth, satire and the vernacular power of Limerick into fiction that is both darkly comic and profoundly humane. In 2026, these stories were adapted into a play “Animals” which is debuting at Ireland's national theatre, The Abbey.  

He began his podcast in 2017, combining social commentary and insightful interviews, quickly gaining a large following. He regularly tours his podcasts globally, with sell-out shows where his mix of sharp wit, empathy and social insight...

Tim Walker is an English photographer. He began taking pictures as a young boy and, after leaving school, worked in the Cecil Beaton archive at the Condé Nast Library before studying photography at Exeter College of Art. 

After university, he moved to New York to assist Richard Avedon, before returning to England where he shot his first fashion story for Vogue aged just 25. He became known for his lavish tableaux and ambitious narrative-driven shoots on location around the world, working with extraordinary props and sets, often in collaboration with set designer Shona Heath. Walker has made six sh...

We recorded this episode in the summer before the announcement that Glenn Martens would be stepping down as Creative Director of Diesel.

Glenn Martens is a Belgian fashion designer and the creative director of Maison Margiela. 

Martens graduated first in his class from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and then worked as a Junior Designer at Jean Paul Gautier from 2008 to 2012. Martens had an eponymous label which released three collections, before he joined Y/Project in 2013, quickly becoming Creative Director following the death of co-founder Yohan Sefarty. Martens worked at Y/Project u...

Carlos Acosta is a Cuban dancer, choreographer, and director. Acosta won the Prix de Lausanne aged 16, and became the youngest Principal at the English National Ballet in 1991, aged 18.

Acosta returned from classical ballet in 2016 after 28 years of performance. During his ballet career, he wrote and choreographed Tocororo, which broke box office records at Sadler’s Wells when it premiered. He also choreographed Royal Ballet productions of Don Quixote and Carmen. In August 2026 Acosta returned to the Royal Opera House stage for a weeklong run of shows, including performing Havana Suite with his eldest daughter Aila

In...

Martine Syms is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, video, photography, and publishing.

Born and raised in California, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and gained an MFA from Bard College. From 2007 to 2012, she co-directed Golden Age, an artist-run space in Chicago, and had her first solo exhibition at Bridget Donaghue gallery in New York in 2015. She has exhibited at international art institutions including the ICA, MoMA, Sadie Coles HQ, and the Walker Art Museum.

Syms has published several books including PICTURES 2014-2024 and SHE MAD, and has her own...

Anthony Vaccarello is a Belgian fashion designer. Born to Sicilian parents in Brussels, he studied law for one year before moving to the renowned La Cambre art and design school. Upon graduation, Vaccarello spent two years working for Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi in Rome, and then launched his eponymous label Anthony Vaccarello in 2009.

Since 2016, Vaccarello has been Creative Director of Saint Laurent. During his ten years at the helm of the brand, Vaccarello has upheld Yves Saint Laurent’s creative legacy with irreverent modernity. Across his tenure, he has steadily reinforced the House’s identity with coherence and...

David Sedaris is an American author and humourist. 

David’s first book, Barrel Fever, was published in 1994, and he has since published fourteen books including Calypso, and Me Talk Pretty One Day, with his essay collections regularly appearing on the New York Times’ bestseller list. His latest book, The Land and Its People, was published in May 2026.

He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and to NPR. His BBC Radio 4 series, ‘Meet David Sedaris’, won a BBC Audio Drama Award in 2026. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the...

RERUN: In the first episode of Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud, I was joined by the legendary fashion master of avant-garde gothic elegance Rick Owens as he lies on the couch. Rick Owens is known for his preoccupation with distortion and exaggeration of the human form through clothes. Together he and I talk about how this plays out with his own physical transformation; what are his current obsessions; and how nothing could be cooler than not having to hold a glass in his hand when he (rarely) walks into a social situation. Honest and insightful, this is a conversation...

RERUN: Zadie Smith was one of my first recordings of Fashion Neurosis. She arrived on a bicycle in the pouring rain, a more typical June day in London 2024. I didn't know Zadie well, but she owned a couple of my velvet suits and she is one of those writers who dresses as brilliantly as she writes. Writing is such a glamorous thing. Seeing a body clothed with style makes me wonder how that person thinks. This is why I was so keen to see Zadie Smith lying on my couch -  to see her and to hear her. 

...

RERUN: I never expected to have Kate Moss as a Fashion Neurosis guest. I knew she hated being filmed and is famously private. I had been doing little experiments with set ups before Covid and one day we were having tea together and I showed her. ‘I want to do this,’ she said. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I knew I must have made something good if Kate wanted to be part of it. Her episode will always be one of my favourites. Her brilliant irreverent wit is second to none. 

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Kate...

A live, audio-only recording from my conversation with Laurie Anderson at the Tribeca Festival in June 2026.

Laurie Anderson is an American writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician, and vocalist whose groundbreaking work spans art, theater, experimental music, and technology. 

She has created numerous multimedia stage performances, published ten books, and been nominated for five Grammy Awards, with her visual art exhibited globally at institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Anderson has a BA in Art History from Barnard College and an MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University, a...

Shania Twain is a Canadian songwriter and artist. She is a five-time GRAMMY Award winner, and the top-selling female country-pop artist of all time. 

Born in Ontario, Shania Twain experienced a childhood fraught with deprivation. From the age of 8, her mother would take Shania to perform after hours in local bars in order to raise grocery money, but also to showcase the extraordinary talent of her daughter.

Through her bold and boundary-pushing lyricism and musical style, Twain helped redefine country music for a global audience, opening the door for the genre-blending sound and cultural crossover s...

RM is a South Korean rapper, songwriter, music producer, and the leader of pop royalty BTS. 

His discography includes solo mixtapes RM (2015) and mono. (2018), as well as solo albums Indigo (2022) and Right Place, Wrong Person (2024), which showcase his remarkable versatility across genres. BTS have released ten studio albums since 2014, are among the world’s best-selling musical acts, and have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards worldwide.

As a creative powerhouse and avid art enthusiast, RM is renowned for crafting profound lyrics often inspired by various art forms. He has an extensive personal art collection with a f...

Rashida Jones is an award-winning American actor, writer, producer, and director with a dynamic body of work spanning film, television, and documentary filmmaking.

Her extensive acting credits include Sofia Coppola’s On The Rocks, The Social Network, Celeste and Jesse Forever, as well as the television series Parks and Recreation, The Office, Angie Tribeca and Sunny, which Jones executive produced. Jones will star in Lena Dunham’s upcoming film Good Sex, alongside Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo.

In 2025, she received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for her performance in “Common People,” the premiere episode of the late...

Flea, born Michael Balzary, is a musician, writer and actor. He is one of the founding members and the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

Flea is a legend in the musical fraternity. His style, both sartorially and musically is instantly recognizable and brings an emotional charge to everything he is involved with.

Flea met Anthony Kiedis in high school in Los Angeles, and they formed the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1982. The band achieved major mainstream success with their album Blood Sex Sugar Magik in 1991. The band most recently released their thirteenth album, R...

Leïla Slimani is a French-Moroccan writer. Born in Rabat, Morocco, she moved to Paris aged seventeen to study media and journalism at Sciences Po. 

She is the author of seven books published in the English language. Her debut Adèle was published in 2014, followed by Lullaby, which made Slimani the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. Her non-fiction work Sex and Lies compiles accounts of sex and sexuality from Moroccan women she had interviewed while on a book tour, while The Scent of Flowers at Night is a medit...

Charli xcx is a British musician, artist, and actor. Raised in Essex, she recorded her first album at the age of 14, and was discovered after posting demos on MySpace and performing at East London raves. She has since released six studio albums, with her seventh album Music, Fashion, Film releasing on the 24th of July.  

One of the defining artists of our time, Charli moves seamlessly between the experimental and the mainstream, building a career characterised by reinvention, collaboration, and a singular approach to artistry that has influenced both the sound and visual language of...

John Currin is an American painter. Currin is widely recognised for his figurative oil paintings in which themes of sexual personae and historical painterly genres appear in surreal and sometimes disconcerting guises. Oscillating between a graphic sexuality and playful symbolism, Currin captures the tones and textures of everyday life with an acute sensitivity and a meticulous attention to detail.

Currin has exhibited internationally at galleries including Sadie Coles, Dallas Contemporary, Museo Stefano Bardini in Florence and Gagosian in New York. His first solo show was at White Columns in 1989, and in 2003, a mid-career survey...

Colm Tóibín is an Irish writer. Born in Enniscorthy, he is the author of eleven novels, including The Master, Brooklyn and The Magician, and two collections of stories. 

His novel Brooklyn was an immediate bestseller on publication and was adapted into an Oscar- nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan in 2015. His most recent novel Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn. In his new short story collection The News from Dublin, these luminous short stories delve into the days and nights of those living far from home: lives of great longing, at a great distance from pas...

Stephen Jones OBE is a British milliner and designer, highly regarded as one of the most radical of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jones studied at St Martins, spending his evenings at the Blitz club, immersed in London’s fashion and punk scene in the 1970s.

In 1980, Stephen opened his first millinery salon in the heart of London. This shop was visited by rock stars and royalty, from Diana Ross to Diana, Princess of Wales. Over four decades later, Jones’s era-defining designs continue to attract a celebrity clientele which includes Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Mick...

Peaches is a Canadian singer songwriter, producer, director, and performance artist. She first catapulted to stardom with her 2000 debut album, The Teaches of Peaches, which introduced the world to her sexually transgressive, fiercely assertive and captivating persona. Since then, Peaches has released four more trailblazing albums, won the prestigious Polaris Heritage Prize, collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Christina Aguilera and Yoko Ono, and had her music featured in cultural watermarks like Lost in Translation and The Handmaid’s Tale.

In addition to her musical output, Peaches has directed over 20 music videos, co-curated a...

Jerry Hall is an American model and actor who rose to fame in the 1970s, becoming one of the world’s most sought-after supermodels. Born and raised in working-class Texas, she was discovered at 16 on a beach in St. Tropez, and moved to France to model, sharing a Paris apartment with Grace Jones and Jessica Lange.

She has been photographed by the greatest photographers including Helmust Newton and David Bailey, and by 1977 she had graced the cover of 40 international fashion magazines. Hall was a muse to the artist Andy Warhol and fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, and sat fo...

FKA twigs is a Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter, producer, dancer-choreographer, visual artist and actor. Raised in Gloucestershire, twigs moved to London aged 17 and became embedded in the underground art and club scene.

She released her debut EP EP1 in 2012, and breakthrough album LP1 in 2014, establishing herself as a singular creative force who writes, directs, and physically embodies her work. Her subsequent albums Magdalene (2019), Eusexua (2025), and Eusexua Afterglow (2025), melded movement, experimental sound, and cinematic storytelling. 

In 2022, she became the youngest solo artist ever to receive NME’s “Godlike Genius” Award, recognizing her impact as a boundary-breaking innovator across...

Dan Levy is an Emmy award-winning actor, writer, director, and producer. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Levy is the son of actor and comedian Eugene Levy.

Dan Levy became a sensation for his work on Schitt’s Creek, one of the most beloved shows on television, which he co-created and featured in with his father Eugene Levy and which also starred Catherine O’Hara. The series garnered countless awards, and a total of 165 nominations, including nine Emmy wins for its sixth and final season.

Levy launched a film and television production company, Not a Real...

Kristen McMenamy is an American model. Born in Pennsylvania, she rose to fame in the 1990s as part of the legendary group of Supermodels including Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, and Linda Evangelista. 

McMenamy was a muse to Peter Lindbergh and Karl Lagerfield, and her short dark hair and bleached eyebrows made her an icon of the early 90s grunge scene, appearing in the famous American Vogue “Grunge and Glory” spread shot by Steven Meisel and styled by Grace Coddington. 

Known for her unconventional, androgynous look, she has worked with many of the wo...

Arlo Parks is an English singer-songwriter, and poet. Born and raised in Hammersmith, West London, Parks released her first EP Super Sad Generation aged 19, going on to win the Mercury Music Prize, a Breakthrough Artist Brit Award, and Grammy nominations for her first album Collapsed in Sunbeams, released in 2021. Parks performed at Glastonbury and Coachella, opening for artists including Billie Eilish and Harry Styles.

Parks’ second album, My Soft Machine, was Brit-nominated and included a song featuring musician Phoebe Bridgers. Parks toured this album globally, and it was named one of the Best Albums of 2023 by Rolling St...

Thom Browne is an American fashion designer, who is widely recognized for challenging and modernizing our contemporary uniform and tailoring. By questioning traditional proportions, Browne’s designs consistently convey a true American sensibility rooted in quality craftsmanship and precise tailoring.

Browne began working in fashion in the late 1990s for brands including Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren. In 2001, Browne began his eponymous label with five suits in a small “by appointment” shop in New York City’s West Village and, in the years following, expanded his business to include ready-to-wear, accessories and fragrance collections for men...

Lynne Ramsay is an award-winning director and writer. Born and raised in Glasgow, Lynne made the short film Little Deaths during her time at the National Film and Television School, which won the 1996 Prix du Jury at Cannes. In 1998, she wrote and directed the short film Gasman, starring her brother James, which won the BAFTA short film award and another Prix du Jury. Her feature film debut was the 1999 film Ratcatcher, which won numerous awards, follows a young boy growing up in working-class Glasgow during the bin workers strike in the 1970s.

She has since written and...

Riz Ahmed is an Academy and Emmy Award winning actor, director, musician, and writer.

Born and raised in Wembley, Ahmed studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, going on to study acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Ahmed’s breakthrough role was in the 2006 film The Road to Guantanamo. He has starred in the satirical film Four Lions, the HBO award-nominated series The Night Of, and The Sound of Metal, for which Ahmed received a Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards. More recently, Ahmed has featured in Wes Anderson’s la...

David Byrne is a musician and visual artist. He was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, moving to Canada aged 2, and later Maryland, where he was raised in Baltimore. Byrne studied photography, performance, and video at RISD and the Maryland Institute College of Art, before moving to New York in the early 1970s. 

In 1975, Byrne co-founded the group Talking Heads, who released eight studio albums before splitting up in the early 1990s. The band made the concert film Stop Making Sense in 1984, directed by Jonathan Demme, which in 2024 was remastered and re-released by A24. 

Byrne established the re...

Fecal Matter are a fashion design and artist duo made up of Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj. The two met at fashion school in Montreal in 2012, and formed Fecal Matter in 2014.

Matières Fécales, the duo’s brand, was founded in 2025, and creates unique garments defined by their phrase “Provoke Society”. The brand is known for their post-human aesthetic and ethos of unlimited freedom and radical self-expression, with products spanning fashion, film, politics and music. Matières Fécales’ name reflects its mission to capture the beauty and grotesque of the human experience, whilst also challenging...

Erin O’Connor is a British supermodel, writer, and advocate. She grew up in the West Midlands and was scouted as a teenager at the iconic 90’s cult show The Clothes Show live.

Erin O’Connor’s modelling debut was in i-D magazine in 1996, shot by Juergen Teller. She soon rose to prominence, walking the runway for esteemed designers including Prada, Gucci, Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior, Versace, John Galliano and Jean-Paul Gaultier. More recently, Erin has walked for Tom Ford and Willy Chavarria.

Karl Lagerfeld once described O’Connor as “one of the best models in th...

Richard E. Grant is an actor, director, writer and presenter. Born in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), his father worked for the British government and Grant grew up as part of an ex-pat community in the country. He made his film debut in 1987 as the titular character in Withnail & I, about an alcoholic out-of-work actor. Grant played a series of eccentric characters in the 1990s, from a fashion designer in Robert Altman’s Pret-A-Porter, to a villain terrorising Bruce Willis in Hudson Hawk, and the manager of the Spice Girls in Spice World. More recently, Grant has starred in Star Wars: Th...

Charlotte Gainsbourg is an actress and musician. The daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, she was born in London and raised in Paris. She made her acting debut at the age of 13 playing Catherine Deneuve’s daughter in the film Paroles et Musique, and her musical debut the same year with the song “Lemon Incest” duetting with her father Serge. In 1986, she won a Cesar Award for her starring role in the film L’Effrontée. Her debut album was released the same year, produced by her father to accompany the film Charlotte For Ever, which starred a 15 year old...

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and author, recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. Fluent in nine languages, she helms a therapy practice in New York City, serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and is an advisor to both Hinge and Culture Amp on the intricacies of human connection.

Esther was born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium, the daughter of two Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors who owned a clothing shop. She gained a Masters degree from Lesley University in Expressive Art Therapy in the 1980s, and has lived in...

Abiodun Oyewole is an American poet, painter and author, and one of the founding members of the music and spoken-word group The Last Poets. Born in Ohio, Oyewole was raised in New York by his aunt, whose love of jazz and gospel music greatly influenced him. He was given the name Abiodun Oyewole aged fifteen, by a Yoruba priest at a temple in Harlem.

The Last Poets were formed by Abiodun Oyewole, David Nelson & Gylan Kain in 1968, releasing their first album in 1970. The group is credited, along with Gil Scott-Heron, as having had a profound effect on...