The Business of Fashion Podcast

Bella Freud's path into fashion was shaped less by legacy and more by instinct. Despite her family name, she describes an upbringing without privilege or pressure — drawing inspiration from the creative people around her.

After studying fashion in Rome, Freud launched her own brand in 1990, starting with knitwear and tailoring. Japan became an early and important market, helping establish her business. Over time, she built a small, agile label while navigating the realities of cash flow, wholesale pressures and a constantly shifting industry.

But it's her more recent creative chapter that has captured a whole new audience. Fashion Neurosis — her podcast, now in its third season — invites guests from fashion, art, film and literature to literally lie on a couch and talk about how clothes have shaped their lives. Rick Owens, Kate Moss, Zadie Smith, David Cronenberg. Each episode has the quality of something intimate and slightly cinematic — less interview, more confession.

Freud says she didn't anticipate how much the format would change her too. "When someone's lying down, their thought process changes. You start to think from your heart more than your mind." And that exchange, she says, is the whole point. "I don't just want to get things out of people — I want to exchange. It's a conversation and it's quite exciting to find oneself saying things that you weren't necessarily expecting to. It feels emotional and I like that."

Whether through clothing or conversation, Freud's work has always centred on the same idea: creating something that resonates emotionally and gives people a sense of connection.

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Freud's understanding of fashion as a form of power was shaped by her time at Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood's London boutique. She describes Westwood's designs not as crude punk provocation but as garments of precision and technical beauty: "like rebel uniforms," she says, but "really, really well made… like couture." What stayed with her was not the shock value but the effect on the wearer — the way those clothes gave you "an aura of kind of unfathomability" and, ultimately, "a kind of dignity." It was her first lesson in what fashion could actually do.

For Freud, clothing and language have always been versions of the same instinct. As a child, she recalls feeling "so much impotence and rage" — and realising that if you chose words carefully, "you could have an effect." That same drive found expression first in her slogan knitwear — "Ginsberg is God," "Je t'aime Jane" — and later in Fashion Neurosis itself.

Freud has built her label without the backing of a major group, navigating cash flow pressures, wholesale shifts and at least one near-collapse. Her recovery came not through a strategic pivot but through a small, almost accidental creative act — 50 "Ginsberg is God" sweaters made for a film with John Malkovich, one of which Kate Moss wore, and which quietly restarted everything. Japan was her first real market; M&S, decades later, her biggest platform yet. What connects those moments is a consistent instinct: to do things at her own pace, on her own terms, and to treat the business as an extension of the work rather than separate from it.

Freud says that Fashion Neurosis has taught her "to be visible in a way that I didn't dare before." The format — the couch, the overhead camera, the absence of direct eye contact — creates a setting that is at once private and revealing, and changes how guests think and respond. "When someone's lying down, their thought process changes. You start to think from your heart more than your mind." That revelation has been as much personal as professional. Breaking with the convention of the detached host, Freud puts herself on the line alongside her guests. "I don't just want to get things out of people," she says. "I want to exchange."

Additional Resources:
Bella Freud | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
How Bella Freud Is Sustaining Success in Her Second Act
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Fragrance is booming, but the way consumers discover and buy scent is changing fast. While scent has traditionally relied on in-person testing, more than half of fragrance purchases in the US now take place online. As department stores decline, brands are leveraging new technologies and creative storytelling to reframe perfume less as a single signature scent and more as an accessory, a collectible and part of a wider personal style.

On the episode of The Debrief, BoF beauty correspondents Daniela Morosini and Rachael Griffiths unpack how short-form video, AI tools, layering trends and packaging are reshaping the category.


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Morosini argues that fragrance’s online shift reflects both the broader movement of beauty sales online and the weakening dominance of department stores, which historically anchored prestige fragrance. What has changed more recently is that digital content has become better at translating scent into something consumers feel they can understand. “Fragrance has historically been a difficult category to sell because so much of the marketing around it… how do you explain to somebody at home what a fragrance really smells like?” she says. Short-form video, she adds, has helped “bridge that gap” by making it easier for people to imagine “if I buy this perfume, I’m going to feel like X or Y.”

Griffiths explains that terms like “fragrance wardrobe” and “layering” are not just consumer buzzwords – they signal a real shift in how brands are selling scent. Rather than persuading shoppers to commit to one signature fragrance, brands are encouraging them to build collections, combine scents and buy multiple formats. “A fragrance wardrobe is effectively your fragrance collection,” she says, but the word wardrobe is important because it “hints at that fashion-to-fragrance relationship.” She adds that layering has become a community-building tool because “there’s nothing more niche than when you layer certain things in a way that nobody else has” and create “your own signature scent.”

As fragrance becomes more visual and more digitally merchandised, bottle design and format matter even more. Griffiths says packaging remains central because it helps fragrance function like an accessory, whether that is a solid scent compact pulled from a handbag or a bottle photographed for a shelfie. “The packaging is really important,” she says, especially when consumers want products that “look nice for you to slink out of your bag.” Morosini makes a related point: design can also tell consumers how a scent is meant to make them feel. She recalls how Paco Rabanne’s One Million was intentionally packaged like a gold bar to communicate aspiration, wealth and fantasy before anyone had even smelled it.

Additional Resources:
Prestige Fragrance’s Online Shopping Problem | BoF
How to Sell Fragrance Like a Fashion Accessory | BoF
Why Fragrance Is the Latest Red Carpet Accessory | BoF

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After a season shaped less by shock debuts and more by second and third chapters, Tim Blanks and Imran Amed take stock of the fashion month that was.

“This season was kind of one note for me,” says Blanks. “It reminded me that in that golden age … of the ’90s, you would go to a day that was just bang, bang, bang. That’s what I still crave — that sense of surprise and that sense of designers working at a peak.”

If last season was driven by anticipation, this one was more revealing; in addition to witnessing how their creative ideas are evolving, new designers’ visions are now landing in stores, meeting customers and beginning to show whether they can convert attention into traction.

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For both Blanks and Amed, Chanel is the season’s most convincing success story – not just on the runway, but in the store. Amed describes seeing customers respond viscerally to Matthieu Blazy’s first ready-to-wear in person, noting that “the way customers were engaging with that product — the shoes, the bags — I hadn’t seen anything like that since Alessandro Michele at Gucci.” Blanks argues that the collection’s appeal lies in the intelligence of its details — not in obvious Instagram gestures, but in private pleasures built into the clothes. He points to a tweed jacket lined with a scarf print drawn from a caricature of Chanel herself and says, “That lining would be your secret.” For him, this is precisely why the work resonates: “He says we don’t make fashion for Instagram… and I think that kind of thing will elicit an incredible response from people.”

Gucci prompts the most debate because the stakes are so high. Amed frames Demna’s task as structurally different from what he previously achieved at Balenciaga. However, Blanks is more interested in the atmosphere and coded intention of the show, even if he remains unsettled by it. “I think that in his mind he was making a show about Italian fashion,” he says, adding that “it came across better in pictures than it actually did while we were watching it.” Still, he stops short of dismissal: “There is so much in fashion that I can look at and say, well, it’s not for me, but I appreciate that it’s for someone.”

Just months into the role, both Amed and Blanks see clear signs of Anderson’s authorship beginning to take shape inside the house of Dior. Blanks points to details like the lily pad shoes, which echo the surrealist footwear from Anderson’s past work, noting that “he already has signatures at Dior.” More broadly, Blanks describes the approach as “a magpie sensibility applied to the monolith of a brand.” Amed agrees that the pace of change is striking, saying “the amount that he’s already brought to that brand in such a short period of time is pretty extraordinary,” even if the process remains experimental. “Not everything is successful,” he adds, “but that’s the way he progresses… he’s refining, he’s a refiner.”

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As conflict between the US, Israel and Iran escalates, the threat to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has pushed energy prices sharply higher. That matters to fashion far beyond the pump: oil and natural gas helps power factories, move goods and produce synthetic fabrics used across the industry.

Shayeza Walid and Cathaleen Chen join hosts Sheena Butler-Young and Brian Baskin to explain how the immediate pressure of spiralling oil prices is showing up differently across the supply chain and consumer markets, and why even a short-lived shock can deepen existing strains on manufacturers, retailers and shoppers.

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The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has immediate and severe consequences for Asian manufacturing hubs, which rely on the Gulf for approximately 60 per cent of their crude oil. Walid notes that for many producers, “it’s a supply issue and a logistics issue before it’s a cost issue right now.” She continues: “Every single person is dealing with the fact that oil and gas supplies are not coming through to their countries.” In that sense, the first pressure point is not simply higher prices, but whether manufacturers can secure the energy needed to keep production moving at all. Beyond the physical scarcity of fuel, the lack of insurance for shipping companies has created a logistical bottleneck that prevents essential energy supplies from reaching factories in China, India, and Bangladesh.

As polyester and other man-made fibres are intrinsically tied to oil, manufacturers focused on synthetics are feeling the pressure quickly. Walid says the impact is already visible in India and China, where producers are seeing both reduced supply and rising prices. “Man-made fibre prices were already going up,” she says. In some Indian manufacturing clusters, she adds, “those areas could very well be crippled if the crisis continues because they only use that type of fabric.”

Chen argues that the more immediate consumer effect is not necessarily higher apparel prices, but weaker confidence. She points out that many retailers are still working through existing inventory, so any inflationary effect on clothing would likely come later. “The more immediate effect on the consumer economy is simply psychological,” she says. Even before prices move materially, “consumer anxiety around inflation, even if inflation isn’t here yet, that’s going to affect how much they’re willing, how much they’re happy to spend on things like a pair of jeans.”

Both reporters suggest fashion is more used to volatility than it was before the pandemic, but this kind of disruption still reveals how exposed supply chains remain. Chen says many companies have become “very nimble in the situation of crisis”, while Walid points to the need for more durable supplier relationships and stronger local support. “It’s increasingly important to consider local dynamics for their suppliers and where their clothes are being manufactured,” she says.

Additional Resources:
Oil Shock: What Fashion Needs to Know | BoF
War in the Gulf Tests Resilience of a Rare Bright Patch for Luxury | BoF
When War and Luxury Collide | BoF

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This year marks the 125th anniversary of Nordstrom — a company that began as a small shoe store in Seattle founded by a Swedish immigrant and has grown into a $16 billion retail juggernaut.

At a moment when the American department store sector is under enormous pressure — with bankruptcies, consolidation and changing consumer behaviour reshaping the landscape — Nordstrom has taken a different path.

Last year, the Nordstrom family partnered with Mexican retailer Liverpool to take the company private, a move Pete Nordstrom says allows the business to move faster and focus on the long term.

Pete began working in the Nordstrom stockroom at age 12 and has held roles across merchandising, buying and store management before becoming co-president alongside his brother Erik. Pete remains sanguine about Nordstrom and the future of department stores:

“It's the best mousetrap. We've got the ability to have a curated breadth of offer. We have an online ecosystem that's integrated with the store, an off-price division with a practical exhaust for things that we don't sell at full price, and then there's scale. If you're big enough, you can be the first call for those brands,” he says. “We can create enough scale and leverage to make your digital business profitable. That's how I would pitch our thing: we think we offer a good solution for a modern customer and how they shop.”

This week on The BoF Podcast, Pete Nordstrom joins BoF founder Imran Amed to discuss the company’s 125-year history, why he believes the department store model still works and how taking the company private is shaping Nordstrom’s next chapter.

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Nordstrom describes the business as “a company with heritage” rather than a “heritage company,” prioritising modern relevance over tradition. The move from shoes into apparel in the 1960s and the national expansion in the 1970s established a blueprint for organic growth, always anchored in service and a focus on the customer.

Taking the company private was a move to secure long-term stability and efficient decision-making. Nordstrom notes that public markets often undervalue department stores due to the sector's lack of a “growth arc” compared to tech-driven industries. By partnering with Liverpool, the family retains 51 percent control, allowing them to lead without the “cumbersome processes” of public market expectations. He maintains that the business is improving not because of the “trappings” of being private, but because the structure allows the team to “lean in with more energy and focus around customers”.

Despite the negative narrative surrounding American retail, Nordstrom highlights the necessity of an integrated “Omni view,” where physical stores and digital platforms share a single inventory. Curation remains vital to compete with independent boutiques, balancing relevance with inspiration, or the discovery of new brands. “We have the ability to have a curated breadth of offer,” he says, adding that the most successful modern closets mix high-fashion houses like Chanel with performance brands like On Running and Nike.

Nordstrom emphasises that successful retail leadership is built on a foundation of tangible, varied experiences rather than academic credentials alone, arguing that there is no shortcut to developing the necessary judgment for the industry. “You’re valuable to a company because you’ve done things that have worked and things that haven’t worked,” he notes, advising the next generation to focus on building a broad professional perspective over immediate gratification.

Additional Resources:
Pete Nordstrom | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
Can Department Stores Save Themselves? | The Debrief
American Department Stores Have a Beauty Problem

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