She’s Only Playing a Therapist, but the Revelations Are Real

The designer Bella Freud — a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud — is using her podcast to “learn vicariously all the things I’ve secretly wanted to know” about celebrities.

“I haven’t read much of anything,” Bella Freud said when discussing the books written by her great-grandfather Sigmund Freud. “I’ve read the comic books.”

Though she may be ignorant of the orthodoxies of her great-grandfather’s tomes on psychoanalysis, that hasn’t deterred Ms. Freud, a London-based designer, from occasionally riffing on the topic. It was not long after founding her fashion label in 1990 that Ms. Freud released a successful line of slogan sweaters bearing the logo “Psychoanalysis.” Later, she would introduce a Psychoanalysis fragrance, an eau de parfum with combined notes of tobacco flower, cedar wood, amber and musk. Now she adds to her pseudo-Freudian canon that 21st-century inevitability, a podcast.

“Fashion Neurosis” is a series of 30-minute sessions that mimic classic therapeutic practice in both essence and detail. A clock ticks. A doorbell rings. A disembodied voice through an intercom says “come in.” A subject is buzzed into Ms. Freud’s “studio,” and an interview takes place on a couch. Sitting near the analysand, an unseen Ms. Freud begins the session.

“I wanted to talk to people who didn’t really talk a lot,” Ms. Freud said last week by phone from London, referring to guests on the podcast like the designer Rick Owens, the actress Courteney Cox, the retired French soccer star Eric Cantona, the former Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon and the model Kate Moss. On the face of it, these people would seem to be so famous their lives no longer hold many secrets. That is before we learn some of their innermost thoughts.

“Ostensibly, I ask questions through the prism of clothes,” said Ms. Freud, 63. “But clothes are just a way to start the conversation.”