I am always confused by the general public still being referred to as the Great Unwashed, when my experience, as a member of said public, is that everyone else seems to be washing all the bloody time. Showers in the morning, baths at night, hair washing several times a week and hand sanitisers in the workplace – you’re all performing your ablutions every chance you get, you absolute perverts. Personally, I find a daily encounter with warm water to be bordering on the fanatical; I just like to not wash and go. So it was with some delight that I read this weekend that the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood is as filthy as I am, and probably more so.
When asked by reporters for the secret of retaining one’s youthfulness – she is 76 years old, still leading the fashion pack and happily married to a man at least 10 years her junior – she replied, “Don’t wash too much”. Her husband Andreas Kronthaler, whose fashion show they were attending, added that, “She only takes a bath once a week. That’s why she looks so radiant”. Just to ram it home, he then added the killer revelation that he himself only washes “once a month”. Oh, but these people are my people. They make me feel better about the constant companion that is my cosy layer of warm filth – for the feeling of last night’s sweat coating your body is quite a comforting one. It is an extra layer of insulation, a way to keep your friends not exactly close and your enemies not really particularly close either.
What’s more, in the British tradition, it is actually rather grand to be this grubby. Westwood may have begun her life as a working-class grammar-school girl, from a culture that tends to pride itself on cleanliness, but over the years she has clearly become too posh to wash. She and Kronthaler are clearly at it like knives – it is real Josephine and Napoleon stuff. OK, so historians disagree on whether Napoleon wrote that letter telling Josephine that he was coming home soon and so she shouldn’t wash, but other letters reveal that a vigorous sex life was definitely had between the general and the older woman who refused to kick her dogs out of her bed on their wedding night.
In fashion circles, there is a strong argument that you shouldn’t wash your jeans too often, as the denim will fade slightly with each rinse, and I can see that these designers have simply extended this thesis to human skin. Too many scrubs and you risk fading away entirely. Keep it dirty. Keep it alive.
It’s not that I permanently subscribe to dirt as an intentional way of life. Most mornings, in fact, I wake up thinking it would be nice to be a clean person, which is why I pull on any old clothes as quickly as I can, in an activity known as getting “pretend dressed”, so I can attend to the urgent needs of my small child and small dog before getting myself properly dressed afterwards. Once properly dressed, I will be showered, with sleek, shiny hair, and clothed in something fabulous that is laced with mystique and wonder. As opposed to the “pretend dressed” part of the day, when I will hump around in something saggy, stained and laced with regret and shame. The only problem is that I have been pretend dressed for around 18 years now, with no sign of the mystique and wonder ever turning up, but pessimism is for the weak.
As for the designers’ idea that the glow of unwashedness is keeping them young, well, I’m not saying I look stunning or radiant because I look entirely average, but people are definitely surprised when I say I’m in my 40s. And this is absolutely certainly down to the fact that my skin remains unsullied by regular battles with water, and not because, after four decades on this planet, I have a childlike enough personality to maintain the belief that I am going to get dressed twice.
I remember once, during a period when I was trying to make more effort, getting out of bed and noticing some rather lovely curls in my hair and a pleasing glow to my complexion. Keen to recreate this look in the style of a clean person, I washed my hair, put one of those bedhead products in it, put foundation all over my skin then various glowy products over the top of it, and – yes, you’ve guessed it, it looked so much worse than when I’d just got up. I felt the immortal words of Dolly Parton (“It takes a lot of money to look this cheap”) echoing around my ears, and decided not to bother again.
The best bit, though – and I am sure that this is why Westwood and her husband have got the dirt thing going on – is that only we filthy people realise the true ecstasy of a shower. Have one twice a day and it just feels normal. Save it up for four days (I don’t think I could go a full week or month like they do) and the feeling of hot water cascading down your back is a sensual visitation from the gods. It’s as good as going for a free massage. It should be sold to us as an ecstasy; a passion that you can visit upon your own naked flesh in the privacy of your own locked bathroom. Doing that to yourself every day seems wildly randy to me. Filthy, in fact.
