Normalising ordinary things

Clothes drying racks, supermarket hand soap, junk drawers & other things we pretend not to have

I’m not sure when it started but a particular brand of hand soap has become a status symbol over the last few years - yes I know, soap as a symbol of luxury and status, who would’ve thunk it. For the uninitiated let me enlighten you.

As a stylist and set designer I get to work in a lot of amazing houses for shoots. Beautiful kitchens, always a fabulous rear extension with gorgeous walls of glass, top of the line appliances, marble worktops, the works. And everything is always so perfect and considered. Not a thing out of place or off the mark in terms of colour palette.

You know what I hardly ever see? Bog standard hand soap by the kitchen sink, the kind you buy at the supermarket when you’re in a rush or you’re pinching pennies and all you care about are clean hands. Nope. Instead there is almost always a pair of large brown bottles by Australian brand Aesop, known for their earthy and woody scented products. That pair - soap and lotion - will set you back just under £95. Or sometimes it’s Compagnie de Provence bottles, similarly priced and in nice glass bottles with scents like Black Tea, Cashmere (?) and Mediterranean Sea. While researching this piece (yes I research) it turns out they are also favoured by the Kardashians who clearly wouldn’t be seen dead with anything as gauche as supermarket hand soap.

I get it, you have a gorgeous home that you’ve spent some serious cash on and the last thing you want is a plastic bottle of garish blue Carex that doesn’t match your Moroccan tile backsplash. And my goodness those spendy soaps and lotions smell good, I’d know. When I first started making good money I fell into the trap and splurged on said soap and lotion and it did make me feel good. Look at me, I could afford the fancy stuff now. For a lot of people money isn’t an issue. £35 on a hand soap doesn’t even register for vast swathes of the country. But for an awful lot of other people, that is serious cash for clean hands.

But what I find really funny is when people keep the bottles after they’ve used up the posh soap/lotion and re-fill them with cheaper stuff. I’m all about re-using containers and I often do the same if I have a nice bottle, so I don’t fault that, but I do have a giggle when I’m in a fancy home and realise they’ve just refilled the posh soap bottle with cheap stuff. It’s then you know it really is about perception, rather than substance.

This post isn’t really about soap though is it? It’s about why we pretend we don’t all use ordinary things, why we are embarrassed to admit to using ordinary things. I posted a video on Instagram this week of my living room in its current state as a reminder that Instagram is not reality and life is messy. I wrote a whole interiors book on it, Life Unstyled, and it is still something I feel strongly about. Aside from the many thanks I received about the video (mainly from parents at home with kids in the school holidays, battling constant mess) the main comment was about my clothes drying rack on full display, draped with half-dry teatowels. It seemed to stand as a symbol of normality in a sea of over-curated bullshit filling social media.

Everyone I know in the UK has a clothes drying rack and most of the time it will be out on display in a living room, bedroom or kitchen doing its job. And yet we all pretend we don’t. I get a perverse pleasure from seeing ordinary items like these in videos or photographs on social media, particularly of celebrities, but also in the homes of people I follow for their great interiors taste. It’s the interiors equivalent of US Weekly and its “Stars- They’re Just Like Us” feature although without the paparazzi harassment of Britney Spears while she pumps petrol.

Working in interiors as I do, there are certain things you see frequently in upmarket homes - designer/luxe light switches instead of the basic white ones most people have; Fairy Liquid dish soap decanted into beautiful frosted glass bottles instead of just your average green plastic bottles of Fairy Liquid by the sink; an Aga oven instead of a Hotpoint from B&Q; Nothing unsightly on display in a kitchen (although always tucked away like a dirty secret in a cupboard or junk drawer somewhere). Working mainly in upscale homes as I do, it would be easy to forget that’s not how most people live.

I find myself straddling both worlds. Of course I like beauty and as a stylist I’m always trying to perfect my environment (in an imperfect kind of way) but I’ve also grown up seeing both worlds, with and without money, with and without status, with and without nice things. At certain times in my childhood my mum struggled very seriously financially, but I also had very wealthy relatives who took me and my siblings on fabulous holidays and treated us to things our parents couldn’t. As a teenager I went to a private school (first on scholarship and later paid for by relatives) but we never had any actual money - I experienced both sides.

I hated when my mum bought Tesco Value Cornflakes instead of Kellogg’s. Having that blue and white stripe packaging on display in the kitchen made me feel poor. It haunts me still. The status of the more expensive name brand cereal meant something to me even as a child, and I was aware of and embarrassed that we couldn’t afford it, especially going to a private school with lots of wealthy kids. So I understand the desire to want to project an image that deflects from a harsher reality. But now that I run my own house - and buy my own cereal - I care far less about other people’s perception of me. In fact I go out of my way to show the reality behind the image. Hence, Life Unstyled.

In the past I’ve been known to decant my dish soap into a fancy bottle and I actually hate having a clothes drying rack out even when there is no-one but me at home. The sight of it offends my stylist’s eye. And yet. This is life. Some people will roll their eyes that this is even worthy of a written piece, but others will understand. Where do you stand? Do you get a tickle, like me, from seeing people’s literal dirty (ok, clean) laundry? Or do you prefer the glossy, more aspirational view?