0lt;p> the original 'knit' girl talks jumpers, fragrance and family ties
Her cult jumpers have made her fashion royalty. Bella Freud, the great-granddaughter of Sigmund and daughter of Lucian, tells The Telegraph about her unconventional pathway to success.
Bella Freud is a fashion designer who rarely draws clothes. The notebook she totes around is filled with page upon page of sketches – not of dresses, daisies or geometric doodles, but of words. ‘This seems to be full of notes from a conversation with my lawyer, a dream, some ideas…’ she says, then flips to a page topped with outlined capital letters reading S-A-D-O. ‘I’m trying to do a jumper for a guy who’s totally into BDSM. I’ve been taking a really long time over it.’
Even if you’ve never seen a photo of Kate Moss wearing Bella’s ‘Ginsberg is God’ jumper, chances are you’ll know something about the designer who has made knitwear a cult item. She’s a Freud – as in, daughter of Lucian, great-granddaughter of Sigmund. Her bohemian upbringing came into the spotlight when her sister Esther wrote an autobiographical novel, Hideous Kinky, which was adapted into the film starring Kate Winslet.
It’s perhaps why these days she’s tentative with her words, self-analysing in real time. She’s also warm and thoughtful, with a dark curtain of hair, strong brows, a direct gaze and an offhand, gamine style that’s all her own. It’s no wonder she’s the designer who has upgraded knitwear from a wardrobe afterthought to the main event.
Today, Freud smiles and proffers a Ginsberg is God box of matches as a gift. ‘It’s my new toy, making matches. That’s the fun thing about my world. You think, “I like this,” and then you can actually make it.’ In her cross-disciplinary domain, matchboxes sit alongside merino jumpers and boutique fragrances. The fact that there’s an audience eager to snap up anything she’s inclined to create seems like a bonus.
‘As long as I like it, I’m happy, but if others like it too, that really is a buzz. I have to have a connection with everything I do, otherwise it just feels like business.’
I tell her I tried a spritz of Close to My Heart, her newest fragrance, on the way to our interview. She grasps my wrist and inhales. ‘It’s incredible how different it smells on each person,’ she says of the scent, which has a nostalgic, powdery quality layered over notes of tuberose and neroli. ‘I wanted it to have that deeply, incomprehensibly feminine quality, the way women seem completely different from men.’
She’s been thinking a lot about Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe, and the modern concept that women and men should be similar versions of each other, when really, ‘women and men are different species altogether. It’s a more relaxing perspective, because you’re not trying to make someone understand you, because they quite simply never will.’
But then she pauses, and adds, ‘I think we all have that boy-girl thing within us.’ She’s wearing an Olatz pyjama top layered over an Anita Pallenberg T-shirt and under a gold Lurex zip-up of her own design, with black trousers and Céline sandals – casual, unstudied luxury. ‘I like that maybe your secret is you’re incredibly feminine inside your boyish clothes.’
When Freud launched her brand in 1990, she produced full collections and held runway shows. One starred Kate Moss wearing a very ‘early Chanel meets Lady Penelope’ blue tweed outfit.
‘I had every intention of [the brand] being a proper synchronised-with-fashion thing,’ Freud says, but economic instability and an unreliable backer pushed her into a more piecemeal approach: a film collaboration with John Malkovich here, a collection of dresses there. ‘If I stopped, I knew I’d never start again, and I didn’t want that to happen. So I did whatever I could.’
Along the way, Freud found that she had a knack for knitwear. ‘What I liked was that knitwear concealed and revealed at the same time.’ Her word jumpers (‘word’, never ‘slogan’, because ‘a slogan is a directive and this isn’t a directive at all – it’s just something that resonates’) are uniformly fine-gauge, fitted crewnecks, often with her spindly musings on the chest or back. Each one starts as a drawing in her notebook. ‘Once it’s drawn, it has its own life, and I know if it will work.’
One of the first, from 2003, read ‘Ginsberg is God’, referring to the beat poet Allen Ginsberg and was intended as ‘a literary-groupie jumper kind of thing’. Jane Birkin, the singer and style icon, saw it and misread it as ‘Gainsbourg is God’ – a tribute to her partner Serge – so Freud remade the jumper, this time reading ‘Je t’aime Jane’ on the front and ‘Gainsbourg is God’ on the back.
It’s since been worn by Alexa Chung, Rebecca Hall, Gigi Hadid, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and, of course, Kate Moss – and become so in demand that it’s reissued every season.
Equally loved by the fashion elite is Freud’s jumper emblazoned with the year 1970. She created it in 2011 by blowing up the date on a photocopier, pinning the black-and-white print to a jumper and standing back to look at the result. ‘It just worked,’ she says. Although it is the Bella Freud design most likely to be seen in SW1 and the wilds of Glastonbury, she says it flatters everyone who wears it in a way she still finds surprising.
‘It has to do with that white stripe. Coco Chanel loved pearls because they shine a light and cast a glow on the whole face. That stripe is the punk version of a string of pearls. It’s beguiling.’ It’s one of the designs she wears the most; other favourites include Ginsberg, ‘The Last Poets’ and one that reads simply ‘Dad’.
That jumper was made in response to the 2011 death of her father. Lucian wasn’t around during her childhood, but Freud says he was ‘a surprisingly good father’. ‘I learnt everything from him. He was incredibly irreverent, and incredibly hard-working.’
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