When Bella Freud thinks of a moment that helped consolidate her style, a photograph of her father, the artist Lucian Freud, aged 15, standing alongside her great-grandfather, the “father of psychoanalysis” Sigmund Freud, comes to mind. Both are a strict sartorial vision in their constrictive tailoring. “They’re not dressed for a special occasion, just in this stuff — and it looks so good,” she says, grinning from her study, dressed herself in a punkish, loose-knit black jumper and fully buttoned white shirt.
You cannot say it falls into the family of comfy, every-woman garments one might expect to find on the shopfloor of M&S, then. Nevertheless, Freud, who has been designing clothes for an upper-crust group of west London friends and fashionistas since she launched her eponymous label in 1990, is here to discuss her new capsule collection with the British high-street behemoth, which is out in all its 27-piece glory at 8am today.
