Bella Freud - Learning To Trust Herself

Fashion icon Bella Freud on abandoning psychics, learning to trust herself and realising that what happens next is entirely up to her. Freud is a designer and creative whose clothes have adorned the likes of Zadie Smith, Kate Moss, Little Simz and…well…me. She’s also a cult podcaster with her hit show, Fashion Neurosis, where guests are invited to examine what clothes mean to them. She’s lived a fascinating life: the daughter of Lucian Freud, the great-granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund and the sister of novelist Esther who wrote the novel Hideous Kinky about their childhood. Now in her 60s, she joins me to explore why she’s always late, why she regrets never joining the circus and what it’s really like carrying the weight of such an instantly recognisable family name. Plus: why she no longer goes to psychics. Bella is so smart, considered and stylish. This free-ranging conversation will make you think, laugh and feel unexpectedly hopeful about getting older. ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Introduction 04:04 The Power of Fashion and Design 06:47 Challenges in the Fashion Industry 11:52 The Significance of Punctuality 17:02 Childhood Memories and Their Impact 22:18 Therapy and Family Loss 26:13 Reflecting on a Peaceful Passing 27:43 Family Dynamics 30:04 The Circus Job That Never Was 32:33 Sibling Relationships and Childhood Roles 36:06 The Legacy of the Freud Name 41:23 Embracing Failures and Life Lessons 46:28 Living Authentically and Joyfully 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: This whole thing about failure of course, is that you can fail and try again What's going happen is what I make happen, so get on with it The key is to stay and finish and then the whole level of reward is so much greater Being late is an incredibly aggressive thing to do 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: You can listen to Fashion Neurosis wherever you get your podcasts and it’s also available to watch on YouTube Bella’s photo is by Lynette Garland (2025) Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ 📚 WANT MORE? Bernardine Evaristo - the Booker Prize-winner talks about persistence, manifestation and making art on your own terms swap.fm/l/PszltDAfnTF5EpG0UmE7 Trinny Woodall - on the setbacks she’s faced in business, single parenthood and fertility swap.fm/l/fJVwewwLr5xEOE1zLroZ Edward Enninful - the former editor of British Vogue and an influential figure in fashion explores his journey through the industry. We talk about his challenges around diversity, identity and health swap.fm/l/NOAt5NDZeBTgX6qZUWpB 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Bella answer live audience questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Suhaar Ali Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Celebrity doesn't guarantee any success in design because it has to be good. I was called prude, 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 sidekicks. I realised probably around 10 years ago or more, what's going to happen is what I make happen. So get on with it.

• 0:26Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 0:47Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 1:32Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels, but I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me.

• 2:12Elizabeth Day?

  Ernesta makes designer quality rugs custom cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home. I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing and Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom. Since establishing her eponymous label in 1990, the designer Bella Freud has created in multiple forms,

• 2:54Elizabeth Day?

  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 Kate Blanchett to Nick Cave has been asked about their sartorial inclinations.

• 3:37Elizabeth Day?

  It'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 Marrakech on the hippie trail, experiences later accounted in Esther's book Hideous Kinky. At 16, Freud moved to London and ended up working for Vivienne Westwood in the 1980s, where her fashion apprenticeship started. Freud was a frequent sitter for her artist father until his death in 2011.

• 4:21Elizabeth Day?

  Of 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.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Thank you, Elizabeth.

• 4:45Elizabeth Day?

  It's so lovely to be sitting opposite you. I apologize for not having a couch. You are upright in the seated armchair. 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?

• 5:08Speaker 00

  I think because certainly in fashion, or really in anything, there are always challenges. And the success is to be tenacious, to persist. But I think watching him not abandon the work, that was something that went in somewhere. And my tendance, you know, I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to, you know, change subject. And, but I realized that's the worst thing I could do. And often, even when I'm in the middle of something that's going well, I, I think I'll just go and make the bed or do something else because it's so tempting to, to leave.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  But the key is to stay and finish. And then the whole level of reward is, is so much greater.

• 6:03Elizabeth Day?

  Your father drew the Bella Freud logo. Is your designing, in a way, a means of being in conversation with him still?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  And the only thing that really works as a design is a thing that he did for me as a design. And it's nice to have him there.

• 7:08Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Well, I've always known that that was what I was interested in, how the power of clothes. And, and I'd 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.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  The process, 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.

• 8:46Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Who's Molly May?

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Sorry, is that someone?

• 9:04Elizabeth Day?

  Or 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?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Oh, 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?

• 9:35Elizabeth Day?

  Molly May Haig.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  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 are, have made their whole world about the story that goes on and on and the identity and the handwriting. I don't have any cynicism. But it doesn't typically 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

• 10:21Speaker 00

  you that we haven't seen and it's really cool.

• 10:24Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  And I like that.

• 10:26Elizabeth Day?

  I love what you say there because. Being creative is artistic, but it's also a craft. It's also about building the wall.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:36Elizabeth Day?

  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 rung her up one season of Love Island, which I'm not, I'm imagining is not regular viewing in the Freud household.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  I probably should, but I, I haven't.

• 10:55Elizabeth Day?

  On Fashion Neurosis, 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.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:09Elizabeth Day?

  What are you wearing today, Bella?

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Well, I, I probably should have thought more that this was also filmed because I was thinking about my brain and talking to you and, and 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, so, 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 Borden Beautiful written on.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Every now and then I realise I need some new clothes and luckily I've made some.

• 11:56Elizabeth Day?

  Go and make them. You are one of the coolest dresses 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 Belfry top that is one of my favourite items of clothing and it has a whole history behind it. So it's the first piece of Belfry 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, I couldn't let it go, Bella. And it still carries.

• 12:39Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:54Elizabeth Day?

  And I wore it, here's the twist, I actually wore this top on the day that I met my now husband.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  How amazing.

• 13:03Elizabeth Day?

  And it was partly because I'd been to see a psychic who had said, you need to wear more colour. Because I was going through a phase of sort of beiges and blacks and grays. 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 favourite colourful top. And I met Justin wearing this.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 13:20Elizabeth Day?

  So, thank you.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:35Elizabeth Day?

  Definitely.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like that.

• 13:36Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  So honoured, thanks.

• 13:51Elizabeth Day?

  Let's get on to your first failure. Which is being late.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:57Elizabeth Day?

  Tell me how you started being late. Where, where does your relationship with lateness stem from?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  God, well, I, 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, adrenalised journey, arriving, wondering if they'll still be there, they're there, and winning them back. And then realising how demoralise, you know, demoralising it is and how, I, I noticed the pattern of

• 14:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  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 twenty years or, I don't know. Anyway, maybe it was the beginning around two thousand. And I arrived an hour late.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  And his face was just like this smile of absolute derision. And I had five minutes left.

• 16:00Elizabeth Day?

  Did you have a chance to say anything?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  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

• 16:29Speaker 00

  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. And then somehow or other it started to change. And I got less late and then.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  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 it's, I have total agency. I don't have, I realised 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.

• 17:38Elizabeth Day?

  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. And 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.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 18:04Elizabeth Day?

  And I'm interested in whether that version speaks to you.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  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, it doesn't, 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.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  It's like, you know, being miserable is a full-time job and it was an element of that.

• 18:56Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm. The ordinariness of being on time, what 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?

• 19:22Elizabeth Day?

  In terms of that, 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, do you think, can you talk to us a little bit about that and those experiences and how they shaped you?

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Everything 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.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Because it was essential.

• 20:55Elizabeth Day?

  Mm.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:17Elizabeth Day?

  Was your rebellion?

• 21:19Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah.

• 21:20Elizabeth Day?

  Because there was a period of time where your mother left you for several months with strangers.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  When I was in Morocco, I, she went to Algeria and I said, oh, I don't want to come.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  And that was that, that was never revisited and we never talked about it ever. It was just off the table and.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  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 travelling and I said, I'm not coming. But they did organise for me to stay with somebody in Marrakech. 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, they lived there. And then eventually she said, why don't you just come here?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  And bizarrely, um, 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 twenties. Everyone was so young and I was seven. And then, yeah, my mother came back and found me there. It was a. 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.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  And because I spoke and understood Arabic. And 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.

• 23:40Elizabeth Day?

  You say now that you've discovered the joys of punctuality. When did that change occur?

• 23:47Speaker 00

  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, this is kind of exciting. This thing is happening and I seem to be arriving almost on time. And this thing that felt like evaded me was suddenly within my means to see how I could get it to the next stage. And, and then I find now that I get ready to leave with time to arrive there. Whereas before I just constantly mismanaged.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  I sort of fantasized it would take me 10 minutes to get from Labyrinth Grove to Hoban or whatever, because maybe it could.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  And, and now I don't do that. And I, it just gives me such a kick.

• 24:52Elizabeth Day?

  So what was happening for you 10 years ago that prompted this, do you think?

• 25:00Speaker 00

  I did this thing called EMDR, which 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.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  These catches went off in other areas of my life. This decision making process improved dramatically. And that was one of the outcomes.

• 25:37Elizabeth Day?

  So EMDR is eye movement desensitizing reprogramming, something like that.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:45Elizabeth Day?

  It's the tapping thing, isn't it?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's different things. What it does is it does with the eye movement. It, it changes your neural, your fight, flight and freeze, 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.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:10Elizabeth Day?

  Wow, that's so powerful and so fascinating that.

• 27:15Elizabeth Day?

  Eyes, ears, of course, these are sensations that take in so much and carry so much.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:21Elizabeth Day?

  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 twenty eleven, is that right? It within a month.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Within a week.

• 27:34Elizabeth Day?

  Within a week of each other.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  My father was dying of cancer and he, 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 and I was, I noticed that and thought, God, that's strange. And she said, oh, 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.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  And she did die a week later and my father died on July twentieth and she died on twenty fourth. So it was so, so strange.

• 28:28Elizabeth Day?

  That must have been horrendous.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was, it was so abstract that it, and in a way, because she was

• 28:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  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 a very immediate person and she'd had, she, they discovered she, 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

• 29:47Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 30:15Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 30:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Because we got, we kind of wound each other up and, um, and 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.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  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 to, she just was like a rebellious teenager her whole life. And when I was together with her and that, we got on really well. And we had things out and some were successful and some much less so. But I suppose on, there was some kind of acceptance of each other before she died, which was a peaceful thing.

• 32:00Elizabeth Day?

  Did your father say, I love you back?

• 32:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:24Elizabeth Day?

  Well done you for your courage in navigating your relationship with your mother.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 32:34Elizabeth Day?

  Your second failure, seamless link, is not joining the circus.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Oh, God, yes.

• 32:42Elizabeth Day?

  So was this actually a, an opportunity?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:45Elizabeth Day?

  Okay. Tell me this story.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  I think I was nineteen and I, I wanted, 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. And 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 said.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Anyway, I went for this meeting and it was in the middle of Shepherd's Bush roundabout where there was this 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 and there would be someone who somehow stayed on it. And I, I went for the, for the audition and I got the job. And then.

• 33:37Elizabeth Day?

  Wait, so in the audition, did you have to stand on a ball?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  No, no, she just sort of checked me out.

• 33:43Elizabeth Day?

  How old were you?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  I was nineteen, I think, eighteen or nineteen. 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, I would then get my living costs. And then when I was in the circus, I would get the 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

• 34:29Speaker 00

  be in it. So 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, and outsider life with a lot of pride. And it's something that I still think, oh, God, you know, I wimped out.

• 35:00Elizabeth Day?

  You do look like you'd be a great addition to any circus. I mean that as a compliment.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Yes, no, I take it as that.

• 35:06Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:19Elizabeth Day?

  And then in your teenage years, that switched. And I wonder how that affected your relationship with your younger sister Esther, if at all.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it did. I, because when we were children, she was the person I trusted. And I don't know if it's an oldest child syndrome that.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  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 soldier 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.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  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, it's the time where you get dismissed and very much so in the seventies. And she believed me and that was such a big thing. I was always grateful and still am for that.

• 36:57Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. What's it like today?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Proving or just disappearing because what everyone saw you're being told didn't happen.

• 37:52Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  To have that information so that it's not dismissed and notice it in other people.

• 37:59Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Oh, right.

• 38:16Elizabeth Day?

  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 defence. And it's just a very interesting relationship that completely shapes who we are and our character.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:33Elizabeth Day?

  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. And I, I just wonder what your relationship is with the Freud name.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  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

• 39:44Speaker 00

  job of whatever it is I'm doing, then who cares? 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

• 40:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:31Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:48Elizabeth Day?

  And he was on Just a Minute, wasn't he?

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but.

• 40:51Elizabeth Day?

  He was already a four a lot.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  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

• 41:04Speaker 00

  we were related to that we didn't know was on TV, but that's. And then also my father's paintings, people were

• 41:15Speaker 00

  quite freaked out by them. When I was younger at school,

• 41:21Speaker 00

  no one knew what it meant. I was called fraud, 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 realised that it was really down to me if I was gonna be ambitious for making my way in the world. It was got to be about being good at my work.

• 42:05Elizabeth Day?

  There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up and running quickly, and Shopify Checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one. If Shopify had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress,

• 42:50Elizabeth Day?

  and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail.

• 43:08Speaker 02

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• 43:37Elizabeth Day?

  Have you ever been to a psychic or a clairvoyant who has communicated with Sigmund?

• 43:42Speaker 00

  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 there 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 I remember, I remember going to this medium who actually gave me some quite brilliant advice. But so

• 44:23Speaker 00

  I went back again and she said, oh, your grandfather's trying to communicate. I mean, this wasn't Sigmund, this was Ernst, my father's father. He said, I think he likes ice cream. And I thought, okay, that's another.

• 44:40Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I wonder if you stopped saying psychics around the time that you stopped being late.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:44Elizabeth Day?

  Maybe you felt

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:45Elizabeth Day?

  you had your own agency again.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  I realised I was just defer, 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

• 45:15Speaker 00

  I realised 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.

• 45:30Elizabeth Day?

  I love that for you. Your final failure is another near miss, it sounds like. So we go from the circus to 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 Vivienne Westwood.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:49Elizabeth Day?

  And you ended up as her assistant. So it does it date from this time in your life, this was 20s?

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, because I first worked for Vivienne in her shops, additionaries, when I was about 17. And then I

• 46:04Speaker 00

  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 Baow Wow Wow were amazing. And they had all had a fight and Annabella had left, I think. Queen singer. Yeah, she was, and I'd, I'd seen her, I'd seen them play. And they were so amazing.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  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, 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 embar- I felt so embarrassed.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  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 courses, that you can fail and try again. It is a really important thing because you realise you're not going to die of shame or about. It's good experience and it kind of makes you.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 48:25Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:42Elizabeth Day?

  And listening to you speak about your embarrassment in this instance makes me think about how closely connected it might have been to fear for you. Because you also talked about being able to speak and understand Arabic. And so you could hear what people were saying about your mother. And there was probably an element of embarrassment there of not wanting to stand out too much. And because you wanted to protect what you could.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  There's embarrassment and the shame, which is about just hating your very essence.

• 49:14Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  And I realised I'd done something that was very on that spectrum. And I thought, you've just got to live with this. And there are other things where I felt much more

• 49:35Speaker 00

  extreme. I can't. And more privately mortifying about myself. And oddly enough, that wasn't one of them. It, you know, it's a story I'd totally forgotten. I was racking my brains to think, you know, what failure am I prepared to talk about? And it was sort of like, in my fantasy, oh, I'll be a pop star. There is a job waiting that this brilliant girl has just left her. In fact, I think she came back because they couldn't find anyone that was her. And she was the right person.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  This other girl got, as it were, the job, but she wasn't in the band in the end. And I realised that.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  This failure of not getting this job was part of the journey of learning.

• 50:36Elizabeth Day?

  So drawing this this session to a close.

• 50:43Elizabeth Day?

  I do you feel that you are living rooted in the truth of who you are?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  I feel like I'm having the time of my life. It's amazing to get to this age. I feel like. I mean, I've always done things and I've always been very driven. But I haven't been able to enjoy my life as much as I'm enjoying it now. So that's the most incredible feeling of excitingness and fun and sort of. You know, self consciousness isn't such a doesn't have such a grip on me. I'm not so afraid of. I don't have so much self doubt. I don't have hardly any, I mean, I do, but it's not self doubt. It's being discriminating about what's good and bad.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  It's really fun.

• 51:35Elizabeth Day?

  You're in your 50s.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  I'm older than that.

• 51:37Elizabeth Day?

  You make aging so exciting for the rest of us. Like, thank you, because not only in the way you make us feel in your clothes, but in the example you give us in how to live. So thank you for that. And thank you so much for coming on How to Fail.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you, Elizabeth. That's so lovely to be here with you and I I have such high regard and I love what you do and I think, and I love the happiness you've you have in your life. It's such a beautiful thing. It's wonderful.

• 52:18Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you so much. I feel very seen by you anytime. We have met and it hasn't been that many, but I feel very seen by you. And I think that's a gift that that you give.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Well, you give that too. You make that possible. So thank you.

• 52:34Elizabeth Day?

  Well, this 1970 jumper has seen me through so much. So thank you.

• 52:40Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.