Hilton Als on Prince, Queerness, and Love and Criticism As Intrinsic | Fashion Neurosis

Hilton Als is an award-winning American writer, critic, and curator. He began his career as a staff writer at the Village Voice, and editor-at-large at Vibe. Hilton became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theatre critic in 2002, having contributed to the magazine since 1989. Als has published several books, with his first, titled The Women, published in 1996. His 2013 book White Girls was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2026 he will publish I Don’t Remember: An American Rhapsody, about the AIDS crisis. Als has also curated and written accompanying texts for multiple exhibitions, including a 2015 show in collaboration with the artist Celia Paul at the Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met, a 2017 retrospective of Alice Neel, and a 2022 show on Joan Didion at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Als was awarded a Guggenheim Award for creative writing in 2000, and in 2016 he received Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his writing at the New Yorker and in 2018 received the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal. Hilton Als is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, Wesleyan University, and Smith College. In this episode of Fashion Neurosis, Bella Freud and Hilton Als discuss wearing his mother’s hosiery under his jeans, Prince, and the power of love. Paid Substack subscribers get our weekly liner notes. This week: an annotated guide to the Hilton Als episode (references, quotes, and a deep-dive reading list). Join us there if you’d like to explore the conversation further. https://fashionneurosis.substack.com/... Painting by Malù dalla Piccola. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:20 What are you wearing today? 00:01:20 Short form 00:09:00 Hideous Kinky and childhood 00:11:20 Wearing women’s clothes as a child 00:15:13 Shame and disguise in clothing 00:17:10 Identifying with women 00:18:49 “Aunty Man” 00:21:36 Dressing up 00:25:25 Early artistic inspirations 00:29:07 Matriarchal society 00:30:08 Love and criticism 00:34:43 Hilton and his mother 00:36:04 Favourite women’s clothing 00:38:59 Fashion obsessions 00:40:50 If you fancy someone… 00:43:16 Prince 00:49:07 Lyrics 00:50:20 Early book inspirations 00:56:40 Speaking out 00:57:07 Supporting women 00:58:35 Outro