“I’m quite slow in the morning. I wake up, lie there… and then I realize I’m going into too much thinking. I know now that action is the antidote to gloom and apathy and that feeling of shrinking and feeling, you know, feeling like you’re failing. Being in bed is the enemy of action so I get up and have a kind of ritualistic moment with myself which involves black coffee; the strongest I can possibly find. I love trembling with it – it creates almost a perfect storm and calms me down. Every morning I have a piece of gluten-free toast which most people wouldn’t really recognize as toast because it’s like polystyrene. But I love it and I have that with olive oil and sugar-free marmalade.”

“I like wearing the same thing, so I’ll often wear something a bit uniformish. Wearing a shirt and tie is just like a solution to everything. I have these variations on a uniform, but I don’t ever know exactly what I’m going to wear in advance as, once, I planned an outfit and I looked so awful that I’ve never done it since. When I go away, I take an absolutely enormous suitcase in case what I think is going to work… doesn’t. I seem to do well under pressure so, you know, if the world was ending, I’d really have a good outfit.”

“When You Think About Those Supermodels, They Were All So Successful Because They Were So Clever. If You Have Good Clothes, You Can Be Cleverer Because You Don’T Have To Worry”

Bella Freud

“When I started I had no idea what I was doing, so I just started! It was 1990 and I’d been working for Vivian Westwood, and I just knew I had to make. I had this fear that, if I stopped, I would never be able to carry on. So I just started making accessories and knitwear - a small collection - got an order from a Japanese shop and I’ve never stopped. Once I did a collection that was one piece. It was the Ginsburg is God jumper. I had this sense of an identity; a girl that I wanted to tell people to look like. She was inspired by the heroine of a Colette novel called Claudine, who was incredibly mischievous, outrageous, naughty, convent-like, and everything I like.”

“I remember when I was right at the start, when I’d done my first collection, I was in a market and this bloke, from one of the stalls, said, ‘You’ve always got to remember to tell the story of your clothes.’ It was such a good piece of advice because I don’t want to design in a clinical way. It all has to have an adventure at the centre. There has to be a story for people to be, you know, seduced by. They don’t buy a jumper - they buy a story. You’re telling your story when you get dressed in the morning. You want people to notice you in a particular way. I’m quite shy, but I also don’t want to be anonymous.”

By the time the evening comes, I have to – annoyingly - find a certain amount of fulfilment or my thoughts will go in a direction I don’t really like. Generally, I need to do quite a lot and I find that, if I’ve done enough, I feel restored to a kind of balance. Action, to me, is a bit like the extra strong coffee: it just calms me down.

I really feel the cold, so I go to bed with tons of clothes on and they gradually get flung off during the night. I try to do something ‘educational’ like a documentary or new music or a podcast. I find that, if I’m interested, I forget about the agitation and fall asleep looking forward to breakfast.