Designer Bella Freud: “Chaos is like torture; exhausting and depressing”

I meet Bella Freud behind the downbeat, garage doors of a big white and empty studio space attached to her Kensal Rise home. She makes me a latte in a delicate porcelain cup and saucer with the words “Suffragette City” painted on the side in pink letters. Sparsely furnished with a singalong, upright piano next to a beaten up gold velvet armchair and an abandoned electric guitar amp, the room has the ambiance of frequently partied venue. But not recently, obviously.

Fewer distractions mean a more efficient, focused and intensified working schedule, says Bella. And she’s been hard at it all through lockdown, re-teaching herself Arabic in the evenings (Bella was fluent during her time in Africa as a child), perfecting her ironing technique (she regards it as an unsung art form) and learning how to do dress fittings via Zoom, pinning and tucking a frock as instruction for a remote seamstress watching on the facing screen.

Rather fortunate then that, at the age of 59, Bella Freud is still pretty much a perfect, petite model size. “Come off it,” she laughs. “I certainly know where I am not perfect. And I now know how to compensate for those faults and fix them whilst on a call. At my age I know what is achievable and how to factor in my imperfections. Instead of being disconnected and making allowances I have learned to be more focussed on what is possible.”

Being busy certainly suits her. From my socially acceptable distance she seems remarkably clear skinned and sharp of jawline. Her top lip cutely punctuated by a mole, messy hair (a natural, undyed dark pewter tone) cut into a style that is half post-Runaways Joan Jett and 50 per cent 1980s convent school girl. Nowadays the bookish, poetry-spouting rock chick is less concerned with looks and more about her legacy. "What I still have time to achieve. I used to be lazier but now I behave as if there is not a moment to lose, no time to fuck around. I need to dive in and get lost in work.”

This practical, single minded, behavioral rigour – Bella’s love of organisation and order, her daily dog walks on Wormwood Scrubs and a gruelling working timetable - is, she says, a direct reaction to her own wandering, bohemian childhood. Just how bohemian? With her mother Bernardine and her sister Esther, young Bella left England to live in a rundown Marrakesh hotel. Surrounded by tagines and mint tea but dreaming of mashed potato dinners back home, the sisters made ends meet by selling hand-sewn dolls on the street. Bella watched her mother fall in love with a Moroccan con man and acrobat and then return to the UK to work as a dinner lady at her the Steiner school near Tunbridge Wells where she was a pupil. Bernadine died two weeks after walking into Ipswich hospital, where she was diagnosed with cancer. The day before, she had been at Rumburgh drum camp, in Suffolk, attending an Egyptian dance workshop and playing the bodhran. Not your regular mum, then.

“What I learned from having an unconventional and chaotic upbringing is that routine can be a very good and calming thing,” Bella says. “When I gave birth to my son (James Lux Fox) 19 years ago, I decided that I wanted to keep working but also spend as much time as I possibly could with my baby. If I followed a routine it would all work out. And it did.”

Bella’s very first collections as designer back in 1994 seemed to be similarly informed by conformist tendencies. Her mate Kate Moss on the catwalk rocking a 1950s nurse’s dress in peachy silk. White collared frocks, dinky little tweed swing coats for adults styled like the ones in the Peter Jones kids department and frosted-pink velvet jackets. Lots of corduroy and merino, slouchy, mannish blazers that had a borrowed-off-my-boyfriend vibe. The clothes were cool and edgy, mostly because they were so deliciously, confrontationally… normal.

“I always loved uniforms,” she explains. “I was devastated when my school did away with them. And structure, I found, is very liberating. All this fantasy about chaos firing the creative process is a disingenuous load of crap. You can’t do anything with chaos. It’s like torture; exhausting and depressing. The more organised I am, the less chaos I am around, the more creative I get.”

During these strangest of days, Bella has discovered an actively positive impatience and is now incapable of deferring or overly analysing anything. “I have this fear of atrophying. Of not achieving. So I just get on with it. Even though l have been mostly alone during lockdown I have still been communicating and progressing.” Does she miss parties and socialising? “Not at all,” she says. “I am happiest at the kind of party where I can end up talking to the same person in a corner for three hours anyway so it’s been quite easy to replicate that experience with long walks in the park, one on one with a close friend. “

Instead of hitting the step and repeat board circuit, her business has expanded, recently diversifying with a new Globetrotter collaboration, homeware and artwork editions. With the help of her friend Maria Speake at Retrouvious on the Harrow Road, the Bella Freud brand is now taking on interior design work for private clients. Bella Freud is on it.

And you have to say that this is all rather unexpected. One doesn’t envision such a fierce and go-getting work ethic from a woman who wears comedic, fun fur sliders, an (own brand) slouchy sweater and super roomy Oxford bags and is mildly furious about the government banning the minty menthol tobacco with which she used to fill the occasional licorice roll up. (“Another small pleasure denied”) But Bella Freud, it seems, is full of surprises. Is the party-phobic designer, for instance, reliably horrified to find her personal life the subject of London tittle-tattle? If she is, she isn’t letting on. Back in 2001 Bella married writer James Fox, some 16 years her senior. They broke up in 2017 but remain close. Fox occupies a flat above her Maria Speake / Retrovious - designed house.

Awkward? It doesn’t seem to be. Fox (he’s the author of the 1982 novel White Mischief and co-author of the more recently published Keith Richards autobiography Life) makes a brief appearance during our conversation – a confusion over doorbells (it must happen a lot). The exes are friendly, says Bella. They share parental duties, a terrier and access to an electric scooter. “My son lives between me and James, we are just a few steps away from each other,” she explains. An unconventional set up? “It seems to work,” says Bella Freud shrugging the shoulders on her slouchy, oversized Bella Freud 1970 sweater.

We’re here to talk about Bella’s new range of little Globetrotter cases and trunks, decorated with her trademark, hand drawn slogans – “In and Out of Love,” “Love is The Drug”, “Situation” and “Lion”. The cases might look elegantly itinerant but are actually intended strictly as staycational accessories; luggage not wanted on voyage but welcome to sit on the shelf and stowaway your secrets. It’s a genius collaboration for these uncertain, stationary times. With Covid restrictions preventing all but essential travel and vacations not yet back on our schedule, Bella wants you to fill your hand baggage not with swimming costumes and factor 30 but with keepsakes, memories and souvenirs instead. Holiday in your head; take a trip back in time.

The project was actually first planned way back in 2019 so any link between her static luggage concept and our current state of enforced inertia is entirely covidcidental. Coronadipitous even. But now in her sixtieth year – an unthinkable number for someone who still looks so coltishly youthful - the collaboration and months and months at home have given Bella a chance to asses her life and think of all the stuff that might fill her own trio of trunks. “Love letters, old notes from when my son Jimmy was young,” she suggests. “A beautiful hand written letter from one of my best friends Suzy Cave that says “I Love You.” Photographs, magazines, vinyl records…my polaroid camera.”

Bella does not want to become a collector or a hoarder. She just keeps random things that remind her of happy and treasured times; a nude portrait of a young Bella taken by Alistair Thain, her father Lucien Freud’s battered wooden oil paint station rescued from his Kensington Park Road home studio, the artist’s paint spattered suits - bespoke double breasted, by Huntsman of Savile Row - which she sometimes lets her son wear to parties. Bella says that when Lucien Freud and her mother Bernadine Coverley died with a few days of each other back in 2011 there was very little stuff to divide up between her and her sister Esther (and Lucien’s rumoured 30 other children). “Both my mother and father had few possessions. Just books really. “

Family photos? Not really a Freud thing. “There are hardly any photos of me as a little girl. During all the time we were in Morocco (aka the Hideous Kinky years) for instance, I never saw my mother take a picture. That seemed to me to be something rich people did. And we certainly weren’t rich.”

As a poor Notting Hill resident myself, I am always up for a bit of Bella Freud-spotting. During the 25 years I’ve lived here she’s ruled as the original West London girl, a Trellick Tower Tsarina, doing her daily, low-key passaggiata along the Golborne Road. She likes to take tea at the Golborne Deli or the Lisboa café. Stop to say hello at the dry cleaners and ask after the owners’ daughter, a former Bella Freud atelier intern. She manages to be shy and outgoing in one adrogynously stylish package. Low on eye contact, big on trousers.

With the Bella Freud slogan sweater being to W11’s one percenters, what the BooHoo hoodie is to the teens of Croydon, inevitably its designer will encounter someone in this louche and rarified enclave of London wearing one. Probably more than once a day. Maybe a friend like Noel Gallagher’s wife Sara MacDonald, Laura Bailey, Jemima Khan or her actor pal Tom Holland gussied up in a banner striped knit that reads “Last Poets”, “Lion” “Ginsberg is God”, “Love is the Dog”, “Je T’Aime, Jane” “Postmodern” etc.

If required, she’s happy to give a short lecture on the OG canon of The Last Poets or explain to a teen the cultural importance of Alan Ginsberg’s words. “I was driving along the Marylebone Road the other day when I saw this very pretty young girl wearing a Lucien Freud t-shirt I’d designed for one of my dad’s exhibitions.” she says. “For some reason I wound down the window and shouted “nice t-shirt”. “ I got a filthy look in return.” She hasn’t hollered at any of her fans since.

“As I get older, I do think about my legacy and what I still have time to achieve. I used to be lazier but now I behave as if there is not a moment to lose, no time to fuck around. I need to dive in and get lost in work. Yes, I am anxious… like everyone else in London,” Bella says, admitting to endless list-making and regular therapy. “But I am also up for adventure and productively. I used to wonder what is going to happen… now I think how am I going to make this happen?”