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 (his preference at home) 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. But the story about Ford that really confused and unsettled me was that he took five baths every day.
That last one had to be apocryphal, right? Even if you had nothing else to do, the logistical headache of taking five baths in one day is an absurd, indulgent, Bertie Woosterian endeavour. And Ford very much doesn’t have nothing to do. When I met him, in 2016, he had just finished directing Nocturnal Animals, his brilliantly creepy psychological thriller. He combines film work with overseeing multiple men’s and women’s collections every year. He has a youngish son he’s clearly besotted with. I couldn’t see how five baths fitted into that schedule.
“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.” Then there’s always a deep soak at the day’s end.
“That’s meditation for me,” Ford said. “You have to give yourself space to think, otherwise you’re just busy saying, ‘Oh God, what movie should we see tonight?’ ‘I’ve got to go to a party, what the hell am I going to wear?’ ‘Oh shit, did I pay that bill?’ So for me, those baths are the times to back up and say, ‘Hang on... what am I worrying about that for?’”
Ford being Ford, he went further: why would you needlessly self-sabotage your life, your career, your relationships, even your sanity, by not taking at least one bath a day?
Certainly, this was my takeaway from our exchange, though I can’t lie, I did have some reasons of my own for wanting to hear that message. I’m not in Ford’s league, but my girlfriend certainly would regard me as obsessive about bathing. The normal stuff that couples do —watching Line of Duty, arguing about whether they have to go out with their friends — are impossible because at around 9:30pm I’ll slink off to have a bath. On nights where I have to go out for whatever reason, even if I’m having an OK time, I know I’d prefer to fire up a Diptyque and lie in a psychotically, scaldingly hot bath with a glass of elderflower and Perrier, schvitzing away the annoyances of my children and slights from editors.
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.
Certifiable genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Hamilton creator, has something close to a power bath: timer set for 15 minutes, podcast on, mostly warm with Epsom salt, but twice a week ice-cold. The comedian Joe Lycett was asked once if he’d ever consider going into politics and he replied, “No, I like baths too much.” I know what he means. Every so often, someone (out of admirable politeness) will enquire about whether I’m working on another book, perhaps a follow-up to the highest-selling book ever written on the Rwandan cycling team. And I always think, “No, I like baths too much.”
Baths, though, are not just about relaxation: there is a strong, millennia-old link between bathing and creativity or problem-solving. The original eureka moment came in the third century BC when renowned scientist Archimedes of Syracuse solved a riddle posed to him byKing Hiero II — about whether his gold crown had been cut with silver by a fraudulent goldsmith — while in the tub (gold, Archimedes figured, as he lowered himself into the water, would be denser).
Agatha Christie came up with her most devilish plot twists in the bath, while Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter famed for Roman Holiday and Spartacus, was such a compulsive super-soaker that he set up his desk in the bath. He had his typewriter, a cushion for his upper back, tape and scissors for editing, a cup of coffee and the unfiltered cigarettes of which he smoked six packs a day.
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 (it’s called “fixation forgetting”). 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. The subjects rated themselves as less angry and more creative when they were suspended in a warm saline solution.
I can’t claim I’ve ever had an especially good idea in the bath. I did think of the pitch for this article while in the tub, but that seems a stretch of both “idea” and “good”. Still, I’ve since learned that baths are clearly hot right now, boosted by both water-resistant technology and a culture that enshrines wellness and self-pampering. The iPhone 11 can withstand 30 minutes underwater, the Kindle Paperwhite an hour.
The New Yorker recently reported on “the rise of bathfluencers” on Instagram. These are gurus who concoct and share bath treatments for whatever mood you want to inspire. Probably the leader in the field, Deborah Hanekamp from Brooklyn, has even detailed a recipe for rescue dogs: a dash of sea salt, smokey quartz, purple rose petals, amethyst and rose quartz crystals.
I have mixed feelings about baths becoming a thing. I’m certainly dubious about bespoke, candlelit soaks for dogs gaining traction. But really, ultimately, baths are fairly democratic and harmless as trends go: you just need a tub, water (still, sparkling or tap) and some time. It probably won’t lead to a life-changing brainwave, but maybe it will.
As Tom Ford told me: “I don’t smoke. Some people go out and have a cigarette. I don’t drink, some people drink. I lie in a bath full of hot water.” And then he exhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and even the contemplation of a bath sent him to a happy place that I know well.
Tim Lewis is editor-at-large for Esquire and the author of Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda's Cycling Team. This piece appeared in March-April 2020 issue of the magazine.
Image: Liberace in his $55,000 marble bathtub in 1978
