TOP fashion designer and queen of punk Vivienne Westwood says the secret of keeping young involves staying away from the soap and water
In a recent interview at Paris fashion week, Vivienne (76) recommended just a quick rub under the oxters and a dab about the bits – my words not hers – is enough. Save that bath for once a week.
Her husband, designer Andreas Kronthaler, chipped in. “She only takes a bath every week, that’s why she looks so radiant... I only wash once a month.”
You can, it seems, be too posh to wash.
Vivienne could probably afford to bathe in silken asses’ milk. Tis far from a silken ass we were rared.
Perhaps her bath comments were a load of old flannel (sorry). But they chime with her fears for the planet, her concern about how we squander precious water and her non-conformist stance.
Kronthaler also told AFP he spent some of the summer in a Tyrolean cowshed and named one of his outfits Vivienne after a calf his wife helped deliver and two others Naomi and Donatella – after, well, Naomi and Donatella... and if you don’t know who they are, just what magazines do you read in the hairdressers?
If I didn’t bathe but once a month, I would definitely whiff of a cowshed. Maybe not a Tyrolean one; I’d reek of an early Seamus Heaney poem – good strong cow pat, a hint of rotting flax dam and the sour fruitiness of fermented blackberries.
It is striking that people spend a fortune on perfumes that evoke wood fires and autumn days – berries and damsons – when all you need to do is hang about a few barns, dunk yourself in a local sheugh and step away from the shower.
An old friend of mine had a bad bicycle accident many years ago and lost her sense of smell as a result.
We used to joke about it, but it was no laughing matter – she couldn’t smell her dinner burning or the house on fire and if somebody spilled milk in her car, she would drive on for months oblivious, leaving the rest of us to hang out the passenger windows, retching our guts up.
She spent a lot of time asking personal questions – what else do you do when you can never ever scratch n sniff?
Her worries even went as far as the smell of perfume. Have I overdone it, she’d ask, as we lay comatose at her feet.
Vivienne’s washing advice reminded me of a certain headmaster in west Belfast who’d stand at morning assembly in front of a teeming broth of male hormones and declare: “Soap and water, boys, soap and water costs nothing.”
Never mind what Vivienne says, the bath used to be my daily haven. I never reserved it just for night time.
At 4pm on a Friday afternoon, my husband entered through the front the door after a hard week at the chalk face and found a toddler plonked straight into his arms before I disappeared into the cosy isolation of a warm bath... door firmly bolted. But how times have changed.
The bath is now something we clamber over to get into the shower. Sometimes that clambering proves a bit of a challenge.
The bath is no longer a sanctuary, it is a pain.
And, having sat in large hot tubs and Jacuzzis with strangers, something tells me that still water is all just germ soup really and why soak in your own dirt?
I do miss that nifty trick of turning the taps on and off with my monkey toes – but I still get to show off by opening and shutting doors.
“Look, look at me,” I shout, but nobody does any more.
So our bath is going, it is on its way out.
“But you can’t do that,” says my mother, askance. In her world, what is a bathroom without a bath? A good wet room, says I.
People used to say you could not sell a house without a bath in the bathroom, but our old Paradise Lodge – I use that term ironically – is not going up for sale any time soon.
We shall have our power shower and to hell with what people say.
It is the sheer joy of standing under a steady stream of hot water – the pleasure of red hot water pummelling your bare back. No grunge here. Here’s to crinkly fingers and toes.
Off to the cowshed and eat your heart out, Vivienne Westwood.
