Fashion Neurosis with Courtney Love: Style as Confession

In Bella Freud’s podcast, Courtney Love opens up about memories, symbols, music, and the intimate cost of fame.

In 2024, British designer Bella Freud – great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud – launched the podcast Fashion Neurosis. The format is conceived as a kind of psychoanalytic session: a voice and atmosphere reminiscent of a therapeutic space, yet the conversations drift across fashion, art, culture, and identity. The guest list so far has included Rick Owens, Nick Cave, Cate Blanchett, Kate Moss, Courteney Cox, and Zadie Smith, positioning the show as a culturally influential project that weaves together different layers of the contemporary scene.

The episode with Courtney Love, released in June 2025, highlights the unique power of this format. The conversation begins with her childhood sketches of clothing – always drawn in the same shape, as if guided by a personal fixation. From there, the narrative expands into family legacy and the role of her mother, who rejected the need to please the male gaze, as well as the unstable family dynamics that marked Love’s youth.

Through the podcast, she also reveals symbolic objects – most notably the white slip dress she has worn throughout her career, transformed into a kind of costume of identity. Courtney speaks candidly about music, insisting that she was never “punk” in the strict sense, but always followed melody as her inner compass. In this way, the podcast portrays her art and style as a crossing between rebellion and fragility, between public image and a private search for meaning.

Bella Freud maintains an atmosphere of trust: the show is not a rigid interview with pre-set questions, but a dialogue that allows guests to move freely through memories and connections between style and life. In Love’s case, this results in a portrait of a figure who remains controversial and influential, but who here speaks with surprising openness about therapy, religion, love, and the price of fame.