Peaches Gets Candid on Style, Identity, and the Wild Stories Behind Her Art
It’s that time of week — and one of our fave pods, Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud, just dropped a new episode featuring the one and only Peaches.
John Waters, nudity, Malkovich lore, and that delicious Peaches frequency where art, filth, fashion, and fearless oversharing all start dancing in the same room.
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The provocative, envelope-pushing musician and performance artist sits down with Bella for a conversation that’s equal parts punk, poetic, and unexpectedly tender. And Peaches arrives fully Peaches: Jacques Marie Mage glasses, a Johnny Valentine necklace, Berlin-designed boots, and the now-signature grills from Alligator Jesus that she’s learned to sing in — “gives that superhero feeling,” she says.
From there, the chat spirals into the kind of deliciously odd, deeply human territory only Peaches can deliver.
She talks about misconceptions — especially the idea that she’s some nonstop, hypersexual creature. “That’s not what I’m about,” she says, pivoting into a thoughtful riff on agency, body autonomy, and why reclaiming your own physicality is the foundation of becoming who you need to be.
Bella pushes further, and Peaches opens up about her early days working at the YMCA in Toronto, where she realized kids are basically punks: no filter, total honesty, and full chaos. She built creative programs for them because she never got that freedom growing up — a thread that runs straight into her art today.
Then comes the gold: John Waters. Nudity. And John Malkovich tying her shoelace.
Peaches recalls meeting Bella back in 2003 while filming Hideous Man with Malkovich — including the moment he bent down to tie her shoe, which she immediately filmed on her camcorder because, well, John Malkovich tied her shoelace. She still has the footage somewhere in her 26-year archive.
The episode also dives into:
- Her obsession with Kate Bush, especially The Kick Inside
- The VHS she wore out watching Kate’s Hammersmith performance
- The interpretive dance, mime work, and theatricality that shaped her own stagecraft
- Her childhood fashion memories, from twin-style outfits with her sister to the Fiorucci corduroy pants she ripped during a school dance contest — and still won
- Her parents’ intense, intellectual, loving dynamic
- Why she thrives on being “outlandishly normal” despite her disruptive art
And in a gorgeous cross-generational moment, Peaches reflects on the lineage of women who shaped her — including Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde, two artists she cites as north stars of fearlessness, self-invention, and uncompromising presence. Their influence threads through her work: the punk-glam audacity of Debbie, the razor-sharp cool of Chrissie, the sense that a woman can command a stage on her own terms and rewrite the rules as she goes.
It’s Peaches at her most candid, most articulate, and most Peaches — a mix of punk philosophy, queer icon energy, and deeply grounded humanity.
Watch Peaches get candid on Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud.
The full episode features Peaches talking style, identity, John Waters, John Malkovich, Kate Bush, and the art of being gloriously, outlandishly normal.
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