Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud · Bella Freud

Alessandro Michele

July 1, 2025·57 min·5 clips

Alessandro Michele's parents: a glamorous 1950s mom and a hippie shaman dad who met by accident and stayed together for life.

Alessandro Michele starts with clothes. He tells Bella he dressed casually, almost without thinking, apart from a vintage Freddie Mercury memorial T-shirt from Wembley in 1992. The shirt is doing more work than it first admits: teenage feeling, memory, and attachment. Around it are vintage pants, Valentino flat shoes, eighteenth-century cameo necklaces, and the pointelle socks Bella catches right away. The clothes do not come off like credits. They work more like breadcrumbs, each one tied to what he remembers and what has stayed with him. Then Rome takes over. Alessandro remembers being eighteen, flying to New York, and going on to Minneapolis to see a friend studying there. A censored image on television bothered him: a woman's nipples covered up. Against the Rome he knew, it felt strange. His Rome has bodies everywhere, in statues, on television, in the visual noise of the city. Nudity did not feel tucked away. Catholicism sits there too, with the Pope and the Catholic Church in town, but Alessandro says Roman people still feel the gods underneath. Bella does not flatten the contradiction. She leaves room for the amused part and the serious part. By the end, glamour has lost some of its polish. Alessandro says the work feels like a gift because he came from a strange place, far from the image now attached to his life. Valentino stays open. Bella is still taken with the socks, and Alessandro leaves calling the conversation strange, interesting, and memorable.

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