Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud · Bella Freud

Annie Leibovitz

December 3, 2025·1 hr 19 min·5 clips

Annie Leibovitz wears a 20-year-old shirt made overnight in Hong Kong, revealing her lifelong uniform.

Annie Leibovitz starts at Rolling Stone. The host steers her toward the Nixon assignment, where a writer's hatred of the president somehow leaves the photographs doing the work. It sounds almost accidental, because it was half an accident: Rolling Stone had ten or eleven pages waiting, the planned story did not arrive, and Leibovitz's pictures became the essay. Then the band comes in. The host shifts from Nixon to the Rolling Stones tour, with Jan Wenner's warning hanging there: too many people came back drug addicts. Leibovitz went anyway. Her answer is blunt, dry, and hard to tidy up. She says she came back a drug addict and that it took about eight years to get off the tour. So yes, glamour, but not the clean kind. She reaches back to 1972, Robert Frank, Danny Seymour, and the earlier tour she partly covered, trying to give the memory its proper weather. Robert Frank mattered enormously. Leibovitz remembers being near him with almost devotional nerves, trembling when he picked up her camera because he was her hero. The room stays gentle. The host lets the answer meander, hesitations and repetitions included, which makes the memory feel less performed. By 1975, another call arrives. Mick Jagger asks if she will be the tour photographer, and the earlier warning sits over the invitation like a dare. The pull is easy to hear. Access, admiration, danger, work, all tangled together. The ending softens. Leibovitz talks about getting older and life in the same breath, calling getting older a privilege and an honor.

As heard by us

A clothes-first conversation that opens into photography, the White House, Rolling Stone, and a Rolling Stones tour.

Annie Leibovitz's visit to Fashion Neurosis uses clothing as a doorway rather than the main event. Bella Freud steers the talk from what she is wearing into memories of the White House, Rolling Stone, Robert Frank, and a Rolling Stones tour, which gives the piece its shape.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Annie Leibovitz talking clothes, cameras, and a life spent making pictures.

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