Psychoanalytic interviews: fashion on Bella Freud's couch
In her popular podcast Fashion Neurosis, Sigmund Freud's great-granddaughter lets fashion designers, singers and actors talk. Here she explains how her obsession with fashion and the body came about.
by Bella Freud
The first item of clothing I was obsessed with was a pink checked shirt. It was worn by a little girl I met at a summer camp. I remember it as a very Spartan holiday, the dormitory had iron bunk beds and grey blankets, but we had so much fun singing Gary Glitter songs while sitting on the window sill in the dining hall. We were both about eight years old and the shirt represented the glamour of normality. I realised how good I felt when I wore it, and I have never forgotten how different I perceived myself. That moment eclipsed the traces of any birthdays or other significant events of my childhood.
This was the decisive memory and genesis of my podcast Fashion Neurosis. I was always aware of the power I had to transform myself through clothes, and I had the impression that people were much more interested in fashion than they admitted or realised. In the podcast I use clothes as a kind of prism through which to formulate questions about how others perceive themselves. In my conversations the important thing - with whichever person I am talking to - is their impulse to go beyond the mirror, regardless of the field they work in, and the search for an idea beyond whether it works or not.
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It was the 1970s and I was about 11 years old when I started to notice the way other people dressed and how they reacted. I attended a Steinerian school and, although we did not have a uniform, there were few who came to class dressed fashionably. The teachers wore long brown corduroy skirts and Birkenstocks. Most of the pupils dressed indefinitely, apart from two girls who stood out. One was called Jane and she was really beautiful: lithe, with pale skin as soft as a butterfly's wings. She had blue eyes that reflected her attitude of attempted rebellion and a head of coppery red hair with fringes that reached her eyes. I remember seeing her in the schoolyard, she was about 15 years old, with a group of classmates. She was wearing a tight long-sleeved T-shirt and tight trousers that clearly showed the sign of underwear. I was almost embarrassed by her lack of modesty, until another girl said: 'Now that's what I call a good physique'. I was stunned, then realised that she was right: all this visibility of hers was so spontaneous and so attractive.
In our house, being five girls, there was no celebration or excitement about our growing bodies. Puberty and all that it entailed were unmentionable topics. There were jokes about breasts - about other people's breasts. Breasts were vulgar, yet they were something desirable. In our house, wearing trousers so tight that one could see the mark of underwear was so out of the question as to be considered obnoxious. And then there was Jane, flaunting all her troubled teenage beauty. A light bulb went on in me: I understood the meaning of freedom.
The other girl was called Rusty and came from the Chiswick district of London. She was different from the rest of us. We looked like unformed little girls compared to her. She looked like she knew everything, but at the same time sported a certain air of innocence and was dressed differently, fashionably.
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