Life and career

Freud was born in London, England. She is the daughter of Bernardine Coverley and artist Lucian Freud and great granddaughter of the inventor of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. Her father Lucian Freud (born 8 December 1922) died 20 July 2011 at the age of 88. Only four days later, her mother died on 24 July 2011 at the age of 68 of cancer.

Her only full sibling is her sister, writer Esther Freud, who wrote the memoir of their hippie childhood in Morocco, Hideous Kinky.

Freud started working for Vivienne Westwood during the 1980s before setting up her own design company. She also spent a year as guest designer for Stirling Cooper and undertook consultancy work for the British fashion company Jaeger during the 1990s. She has been responsible for the relaunch and revamp of fashion house Biba.

Freud is married to James Fox, the author of the book White Mischief, and they have one son named Jimmy born around 2001.

Freud worked with John Malkovich in 1999 to produce three short films in forty-eight hours to document her fashion collection.

In an appearance on the BBC current affairs program Newsnight on 2 August 2006, she voiced an impassioned denunciation of Israel's "disproportionately violent aggression" in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict.

Bella Freud has contributed to the Sunday Telegraph free magazine Stella, with a column called "Bella on Beauty". She recently partook in a fashion shoot with the closest of Vivienne Westwood's friends and clientelle, in which Freud was dressed in a gold boiler suit complete with pipe and hat.

In 2007, Freud launched her own knitwear collection. To illustrate her work she collaborated with Elle Muliarchyk, a model and artist who was called "Guerrilla Model" by The New York Times. On her travels around the world Elle Muliarchyk created imaginary film stills by photographing herself wearing Freud's designs, only at nights, at often dangerous locations. These images, called Journey to the End of the Night, was exhibited during London's Frieze Art Fair in 2007.

Freud's recent collection was featured in The New York Times Exclusive Short "The Last Poet".

[ Source: Wikipedia ]