Fashion Neurosis with Hilton Als

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.

Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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