Fashion designer Bella Freud is the daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and Bernardine Coverley, and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. She worked for Vivienne Westwood in the 1980s before starting her eponymous label in 1990 and is particularly renowned for her signature jumpers, with slogans such as “Ginsberg is God”. In 2024 she launched her podcast Fashion Neurosis, with each episode featuring a different cultural figure lying on the couch and discussing the connection between fashion and identity. Guests have included Zadie Smith, David Cronenberg and Rosalía. She lives in London and has a son, Jimmy, with the writer James Fox.

(National Portrait Gallery, London, until 4 May)

When my father died in 2011, the National Portrait Gallery had been working on a big show of his [which opened in 2012] and I kept immersing myself in it, going in and out, as a way of processing my grief. On the last night it stayed open until midnight and some of the family went there together. Now the gallery has this new show featuring a lot of his early work, even childhood drawings, and some I hadn’t seen in real life, only in books. It's not often I relate to art in a fashiony way, but some of the clothes in the drawings I've been seizing on, like, “oh I love the lapel”, “I love the stitch detail”. There's one picture of him there when he was 15 with his grandfather, Sigmund Freud, just before Sigmund died, in [former home] Maresfield Gardens, and they've both got the most amazing jackets on and I love that the tailoring is so good – it’s obviously a bit of a random detail, but it means a lot. 

One work that I particularly love in this show is a drawing of Peter Watson, who funded Horizon magazine and nurtured young artists and literary figures. It’s so elegant and so melancholy: I think he was gay, and he's looking down, and it's just so full of atmosphere. Another one, which I now have as my phone screensaver, reminds me of both my son and my dad. There are three portraits of me in the show and I like to be in there. It’s a different way of being close; he's dead but it's evidence of our time together. It's like being with him, in a funny sort of way.

I had never read any Arundhati Roy but my sister came back from India and said: “I've been reading this memoir, I think you should too.” If I can get the author reading, I like listening to things on Audible because often I'm travelling or walking. So I listened to Arundhati read it and I was completely spellbound by her anarchic resilience and the way she was so wild, but she never destroyed herself. She had this appallingly dominant mother and yet there's not a shred of self-indulgence. There's no self-pity, but there is an acknowledgement of outrageousness, which is so different. It's so interesting when someone can write about having been treated badly. In a way, it's like that amazing woman Gisèle Pelicot – she’s somehow still herself after experiences which are so extreme.

I used to wear Azzedine Alaïa when he first started and I had one dress that really gave me this amazing figure. It was incredible. The current designer there, Pieter Mulier, is now leaving to go to Versace and I love what he does. He's a real talent with a lot of sex appeal – they’re very lucky to have him. I often go into Alaïa each season, have a look, and then end up buying a pair of amazing shoes. The clothes are exquisite, but I can't afford them: there are things such as transparent trousers, like harem pants, made of tulle and I think “maybe I could wear that”. They give you imagination. They're so well designed that you think “maybe I could…” I went in recently and bought a pair of white patent winklepicker boots: they're fucking great. Because they’re so long and pointed, they make me walk like a sort of cowboy, swaggering around. He's a real genius.

I first met Christian Louboutin in 1991 and now he’s one of my best friends and my son’s godfather. He had a room at the back of his shop full of bits of fabric and stuff, and sometimes I used to sleep in there when I’d go to Paris. Now he’s become mega-successful and he’s still exactly the same: he’s still just so fantastic. Every year me and Jimmy go and stay with him in Portugal and we’ve watched as he built this hotel in a small valley. I haven’t stayed there because I stay with Christian, but I've had dinner there and hung out there and it's just so beautiful and poetic. It’s quite small and the garden is quite wild, but organised. Each bedroom is designed differently, with artworks in – he travels a lot and ships things back. He's the most creative and inventive person.

I first met my facialist, Joanne Evans, when I was writing a beauty column for Stella magazine in the Telegraph. It was maybe 25 years ago and people would get in touch and say “do you want this?” Sometimes I would try them out, and that’s how I met Joanne. I go and see her every month and I’ve got much better skin now than I had in my 40s. She just knows what to do and she's incredibly nice – she doesn’t do any injections or anything, she just manages to pep me up. She now has this beautiful place of her own, Skin Matters, and when I go I get into this kind of warm bed and fall asleep. When I wake up, she's healed me.

Interview by Imogen Carter