You know, I often watch a film
particularly to see if I can see something
in how people are dressed or what they're
wearing or how they're wearing it.
Because the way I design is so much about
distilling an emotion into one statement
or an edit of how you're dressed.
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My name is Bella Freud and I'm a fashion
designer. For my inspiration, I look
around pretty much everywhere.
And sometimes it will be something
I've read. You know, I have, like,
a repertoire of things that I think
about or look at when I'm starting a
collection or I need to go further or I'm
looking for something that's missing.
Somehow it embeds itself if I draw it out.
It's like a muscle memory.
It's like learning an instrument.
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If I hear anything of the slightest
interest, I'll draw it out.
La Belle et la Bête, you know, classic
fairy tale from childhood, but interpreted
by Jean Cocteau, it's got a sadness and a
beauty about it. It's like a Greek myth.
It's completely spellbinding.
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The scene where the candlesticks
open their arms as you go
along the corridor and it's all black,
I think that's one of the greatest
images ever. Everyone is wearing these
amazing outfits, even the beast. You know,
there's this great wild, shaggy
head coming out of these amazing
evening clothes. Life is pretty
far-fetched. And when someone captures it
well in a film, it's credible.
And I think the clothes are so important.
And if you get the costumes right,
you see the character much
more multidimensional.
I think that is really exciting.
It's kind of a fizz moment always in a
film. When I started my own label,
I decided to make films instead of doing
fashion shows. I just thought that I would
be able to get my idea of identity across
better through film even though I had no
idea how to make a film.
I hadn't the faintest idea.
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[inaudible] a film that really does have
beautiful costumes is Belle de Jour,
you know, they're all Yves Saint Laurent
costumes and Buñuel is my favourite
director and I love the way he uses
clothes in his films. They're sort of
fetishistically feminine but
in a very kind of demure way.
Immediately there's all
these kind of different facets of the
man-woman relationship.
She's quite a kind of contained person,
Catherine Deneuve, in that film and
Pierre Clémenti character is so wild and
so seductive, and then he wears that
leather mack and that leather mack
haunted me for years and it was almost
like what he wore, she was almost wearing.
And even though the clothes are so
unforgettably beautiful and exquisite,
you don't really overly think about them
because the story and the film itself is
just beyond everything.
Five Broken Cameras,
I saw it four times actually.
I thought it was a brilliant film.
And it showed so well the sort of ordinary
life of Palestinians in their own occupied
land and how they try to deal with it,
how to protest against being treated
really badly without resorting
to violence.
What's great about the
film as well is that he's
an artist. He's really interested in
filming his children, his little boy,
you know, who he uses as the eyes
and how his life is in this world.
If he wasn't living under occupation,
maybe he would have made a film. You know,
art is an important prism to show how
things matter. It's another way
of bringing people to the table.
And I've always had a love of protest,
imagery, and posters, and record covers,
and all that stuff, and you have to choose
how to show that and sometimes a T-shirt
is the way to do it and it's really
exciting to get that into fashion in some
way, but without battering people over
their head with it.
I think independent cinema
is the most important because it's where
you see ideas uncensored, unadulterated,
unfiltered because, don't get me wrong,
you know, all film is really interesting,
but without independent cinema,
there's no kind of cooking pot.
You just see things you've never seen.
It just generates this kind of incredible
wake-up calls all over the place.
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