Satisfyingly Posh: Fashion Neurosis; Musing on Class, Culture and Style

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I am enamoured of Bella Freud’s podcast ‘Fashion Neurosis’.

She invites her guest into her home, where they lie down on her couch; an on-the-nose nod to her great-grandfather Sigmund Freud, and respond to questions on fashion, style and life. It is curious how quickly people open up about their full lives, with Freud's gentle direction and self-disclosure. There is something sincere and disarming about the set up. Yet I also project that in no small way this is about the sincerity and originality of her guests. Artists, authors, fashion designers, people who live at the edges and live in their fullness. You can kind of tune into the frequency of people who are selling something, deflecting away from themselves, even if they speak a lot and they are usually from the world of business, a world I love, and the sincerity is there, but the depth is different.

Yet this particular podcast doesn’t come off as being gimmicky, or trite, it’s a satisfying inquiry into taste, fashion, aesthetics and on occasion, the mysterious world of the upper-classes or high-brow as it were, designers, writers and cultural icons.

It is fascinating and whatever happens when these cultural icons lie down, there is an exchange that goes far beyond the usual interview. A frequency they tune into. There has only been one interview I found to have a little less depth, but I understand that conversation’s function. Posh enough, excellent for business and no-one is under any illusions about that. For every obscure author, edge-dwelling fashion designer, musician or actor, one needs a commercially successful figure to draw an audience.

With her velvety, low-volume voice, this is the ultimate antidote to blustering, chirpy, and excessively theme-tuned podcasts. The theme music, much like Freud’s own muted tones, is a simple piano composition, upon which you can hear the felt hitting the wires of the piano. That’s it. The first episodes were also ad-free; a real treat, but podcasts don’t pay for themselves, so adverts it is.

Intonation is employed sparingly with soft, velvety tones and plumby accents; accents utterly unself-conscious, self-deprecating but not in the cloying way that the middle classes mimic in order to protect themselves from having ideas above their station. Hers is the world of the intellectual, the artist and those of lineage. We are all of lineage. I am fascinated by class and its impulses, gifts and crosses to bear. Class is no protection against being human. The inimitable Issy Blow is testament to that, an icon who receives air time in the Daphne Guinness episode. As does Guinness’s Fascist-loving relative, one of the Mitford sisters. Class does not protect against fascism either it would appear.

Ms Guinness in the Guardian

Freud has no station nor obvious political affiliation - born into indescribable class and lineage, coupled with uncertainty and poverty, she is one of artist Lucian Freud’s fourteen known children and sister of writer Esther Freud. She has had her fashion design brand for 30 some years. Her mother is Bernardine Coverley, a multi-hyphenate creator and bohemian born in London to Irish-Catholic parents who narrowly escaped the horrors of the homes for unmarried Mothers when she fell pregnant with Lucian Freud back in the 60s. Some people have different paths that take them on adventures that weave through all manner of landscapes - cultural and topological.

The kind of cultural positioning that her family occupies is perfectly and at times, disconcertingly described as “Upper class kink and wickedness”; everything everywhere all at once (in her half-sister, Rose Boyt’s  memoir of her Father Lucian; ‘Naked Portrait’, one of my Spring 2025 reads).

You may remember Bella Freud, her sister’s and her mother’s life immortalised in the movie ‘Hideous Kinky’, which documented a part of her childhood in Morocco. I haven’t read this book, although I intend to, now that the film is a distant memory and I have a love of reading the likes of which I haven’t experienced since a spell in the 90s and when I first moved to Japan and devoured every English book I could get my hands on in the library in Atsugi, which had a surprisingly good selection of English books.

Guardian bookstore

I have long-since been fascinated by Lucian Freud, his fervent and obsessive impulse to paint. Also his assistant who humbled me to the idea of an unconditional supporting Spirit. This reminds me at a soul-level to be a devoted supporter of my clients and the people I work with. And more challenging ti humble myself to be unconditionally supported by my people and team. To humble myself - I do not have to deserve it, we are all in service of the work I do in the world; that is its own frequency and the outcomes are evident. And secret. Being the support of a spirit that cannot be realised without material-world activity is an act of creation I realised upon reading his devotion to Freud and his process.
Fashion Neurosis and my favourite bits:

Rick Owens on sobriety:

BF: I wondered how you dealt with the self consciousness; of how you dealt with the self-consciousness of walking into a room without a mood-changer, I wonder how you dealt with…

RO: “It was so cool not having to rely on anything - that nothing could be cooler than not having to hold a glass in my hand, that that is, to be so self-reliant and so confident that you don’t need that stuff; what could be more glamorous and sophisticated than that? So that, somehow I managed to convince myself of that. It worked. I can’t remember that transition but not needing stuff is great…”

Rick Owens on Bella Freud’s couch in a clip from Fashion Neurosis

Highlights include 

• Rick Owens talking about how he loves being sober and how he walks into a room sober (but mostly doesn’t go out much anymore)

• Daphne Guinness and Freud talking about the Aristocratic ‘gypsies’ [sic] who travelled around the British countryside in painted caravans - there can be few things more upper class than that.

• Nicky Haslam saying he’s dressed head to toe in Primark inspiring Freud to say ‘wellllll that's a vote of confidence…’ then in the next breath his saying ‘Of course Queen Victoria was my mother’s Godmother’...the juxtaposition being absurd but also how class and culture entwine these things entirely unselfconsciously.

• Nick Cave talking about how he met his wife Susie Cave - magical chaos - and the way he talks about her with beguiled devotion. It’s mythical. Magical.

“Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous." Queen Victoria

This awakening of interest in the Freud dynasty and all the itinerant surrounding people got me thinking deeply about class, culture, art, money and access. How, many of Freud’s children grew up in relative poverty, yet his money (that which he hadn’t gambled) and access to networks, was accessible to them and their surroundings.

Culture, being part of culture, being interested and having culture and access to culture. The Colony Club, the conversation, the people, the culture. The Art - I am of course quite interested in all of this, that is evident - I love it and I wouldn’t suggest am aspirational but have always felt like I were trying to find a place in this whole society thing. I feel most at home either stewarding retreats and coaching sessions, or alone and immersed in art and artists. One of the great gifts of hyperfocus is heading down rabbit holes and finding out as much as possible and watching and reading as many things as possible on a topic and thus, I learned so much about the Freud dynasty and the surrounding players. Being a psychology major, of course I have a relationship with Sigmund Freud, Bella’s great grandfather, one that has waxed and waned over the years but he is of course a major influence on all the systems within which I work, Jung took the realms.

And so to culture - NOT the kind of culture that insists that you abide by its rules but that which affords one unlimited access to creativity and edge so long as you understand the etiquette and basic rules. Which is frankly no small feat. It also demands one is not nice, but most definitely real. I muse.
I shall never be this cultured - too parochial, provincial, too Marks and Spencer. Too self conscious. I’m not sure though - perhaps this is an edge. Already I have been an integral part of many cultural moments in Liverpool, Birmingham and Tokyo. A shape-shifter. Traversing lines and subcultures. Spirit. I’m conscious. Awake. Woke.

The Gallagher brothers, the Beatles, Neneh Cherry, her Mother Moki and father Don Cherry, The Edies of Grey Gardens. These people, although financially not rich at either the start or close of their lives, sometimes in poverty and squalor, had art, beauty and culture driving them across class. I could say the same for the supermodels  - transcending a certain middle-class lack of imagination with their creative and stylish endeavors, their delusions and creativity. Their ability to bring creations to life and be present in realms.

And what of me? I find it somewhat hard to express what I mean. My own self-conscious comfortable middle of the middle of the middle class can be a straitjacket. My experience was landing nowhere, having a regional accent means people from UK will take to me in a certain way; coded as Northern and regional (a bit like being coded as Osaka or New Jersey) and people from outside the UK will often mimic my accent as though we were in an episode of The Crown. As such class has always been something that has fascinated and baffled me and around which identity jiggers, and now, in my delightful and delicious mid-fifties, with the clarity of sobriety and eldership, I’m little by little coming into my own and savouring the delights of the instructions of the middle class that I received while understanding the chameleon-like qualities that have been developed over the years while traversing class, corporate and cultural lines. I always knew in my heart that I was an artist, but the confines of the middle of the middle of the middle directed me toward academic science - a diversion that now in hindsight, I am immensely grateful for because I understand the true spirit of real science, a good robust research project and control groups. It’s artful. Choices are made but our true nature may find us, waiting and perhaps in this lifetime we will dedicate ourselves to it. Perhaps. Perhaps I will succumb to my nature, and in the meantime, I look out for clues, flirts, universal winks. Pretentious. They are ever-present. Magic is forever available. Realms.

BBC

This is by no means intending to glorify poverty or class. What one is born into is, to my way of thinking, an accident of birth; this is the most humble analysis I can make on this matter - I deny the idea that I was especially chosen for these parents or chose them in order to do my souls work or I’m here to test theirs or some such narcissistic spiritual bunk (and believe me I enjoy spiritual inquiry and my own relationship with unseen things…). I cannot, in good conscience, believe that I somehow deserve to have been born into relative ease while a schoolfriend was parenting and taking care of their entire family while at school, as their parents lived in the ravages of high dependency alcoholism and actual poverty. That is what happened. From this place of ease, from this place of plenty and of sheer luck of the time and place draw, how does this give shade and colour to the next phase of this life? A place of plenty. Succumb to nature.

Yet, I do note, with absolutely no confidence, that culture and class do ascend poverty and if one is poor and upper class then options are open and there is access to networks, and there is a certain expectation that lives inside a person - an entitlement that life must be lived. Those outside of cultural norms; immigrants, outsiders, the queer, truly creative, neurodivergent, ascend norms and class lines.  Perhaps this is what Queen Victoria found so threatening. Perhaps it is prudent to affirm that class cannot skirt around mental illness. Isabella Blow remained fabulous even after her fall from grace and into the ravages of suicidal depression, which eventually took her. Lee McQueen transcended class with his art, yet could not escape the grip of depression both ultimately dying of their affliction. They were beloved of one another, having been born into different realms. Kindred in another. Realms transcend culture and class. Can I say this with confidence? Acces the realms; realms transcend. Art is a portal. Connection. Collectives. Stories. Memory. Dreams. Fashion. Authentic being. I am endlessly in inquiry on these matters. The matter of realms.

Vanity Fair

Bella Freud herself talks of the time, shortly after returning from Morocco, with her penniless mother when she was ushered off with her aristocratic friend, three years her senior to hanging out on an estate. Of course when one is young, one doesn’t really understand the travails - one will notice abundance and scarcity and who has more and less, but it will just seem like the part of life I think. She herself always battled with the wish to wear a uniform, while attending a Steiner School with its crunchy rules around clothing. She of course began an entire fashion brand based in sharp tailoring, graphic knitwear and uniform-like suits. She abhors a Birkenstock and cheescloth.

Committed artists and creatives find a way to take their situation and elevate it. I remember reading a conversation with Patti Smith, when someone was lamenting the gentrification of the East Village and how unaffordable it now was for artists and musicians. Her response was something along the lines of - it was not about the East Village, it was about its affordability, unattractiveness to the middle class, and the access it gave poor artists to Manhattan and to New York and to studio space. She said that if artists were truly concerned with finding places to gather and have studio space, they would turn their sights to places that have that same frequency that the East Village of the 60s and 70s had, like Detroit. I think about this a lot. 

Fashion Neurosis is to me a fascinating window into the myths and legends of artists, authors, creatives and designers from whom we would not usually hear. And certainly not with such gentle candor. A welcome antidote to the the blustering, overly-lit, ‘just asking questions’ podcasts that churn out the same guests across broadcasts and deliver opiate to the masses.

A gentle cultural balm that will surely subvert from within (Crass).