If you need me I'll be in the tub...
Before you meet Tom Ford, it’s hard not to fritz just a little over everything you’ve heard about Tom Ford. That you have to address him only and always as “Mr Ford”, for example. Or that he has two states of dress: naked or immaculately turned out, habitually in a black, two-piece suit. That he is repelled by hot drinks, the smell of food in his office, and that he once sent home an employee for wearing three-quarter-length trousers, which if it’s not true certainly should be.
“Oh, I can explain that,” Ford replied breezily, his Texan drawl languid and honeyed. And he did. Five does happen — when he’s really frazzled or overwhelmed — but the standard is three. He doesn’t sleep well, so he’s already in and out of the tub before anyone else in the Ford household wakes up. He has another bath at the end of the working day: “Because I can’t be good at a dinner — meaning be interesting and charming and be interested and listen to someone — unless I wash away the day.
Baths, and certainly multiple baths everyday, are obviously a preposterous pastime. But there are clearly a lot of people who feel the same way. Gwyneth Paltrow has a nightly bath in pharmaceutical-standard Epsom salt: the classic, fizzy, scientifically nebulous magnesium mix. Mariah Carey considers the bath “my place of serenity”. There’s a legend that she only uses French mineral water, but she clarified recently that this was not true. Actually, her preference is cold milk.
There’s actually some science here. Baths are meditative, solitary, the perfect environment for an uninterrupted stream of thought. They are places where your ego and internal critic don’t dominate. Alpha waves rip through your brain making unlikely associations that don’t occur to you when you are thinking more analytically . One study compared the ideas that emerged from a 90-minute office session versus an hour spent in the silence and darkness of a flotation chamber.