A new Northern Hemisphere seasonal tradition has taken firm hold: debating what’s “common” according to an annual master list drawn up by a celebrity designer.
Nicky Haslam’s November list of all things naff is issued on a tea towel – or “drying-up cloth”, as he calls it – which commands the uncommon price of £40 (NZ$83).
While rude, arbitrary and an almighty cheek, given that styling oneself a “designer” might be considered common and a “celebrity designer” positively vulgar, the Haslam towel has become an institution by inspiring many enthusiastic commoners to mentally marshal their own hot/not lists.
For the susceptible, the list is useful for Christmas budgeting, including, as it does, sundry costly items they can now cross off: cockapoos, craft gin, French ski trips.
For the snobbery-resistant, it’s a bit of fun to see how many sins they’ve committed according to the common-o-meter.
What’s most compelling about these edicts, though, is how perversely even-handed they are. Future generations of anthropologists will study these towels as a snapshot of the British class system (chiefly the upper and middle bits of it), puzzling over how it has fetched up in so much sameness of habit. Haslam is himself a toff, but he’s common-listed polo, Henley and even the royal family. He holds dressing for dinner to be pretentious.
He’s not upholding old traditions here, but purloining all comers with his distillation of things that have become irritatingly popular or simply affected: crazes like “designer” dogs, foodie must-haves and allegiance to “it” brands of commodities as quotidian as house paint. That people on quite ordinary incomes know that Elephant’s Breath and Mouse’s Back are fashionably murky colours on the Farrow & Ball colour chart is, as Haslam’s listing implies, hilariously absurd – especially at NZ$230 per 5-litre tin.
Of the more challenging listings – grieving, relaxing, organic food, being ill – Haslam has recently clarified that it’s not the actual item or activity he disdains but the disproportionate fuss people make over having it or doing it, specially the social media humble-bragging. Vegetables “from our garden”. Wine collecting. Personal trainers. Expensive bicycles. Sobriety. Nothing wrong with them if only people would stop whanging on about them.
Who among us hasn’t been guilty of, or bored by, the oversharing of some of those preoccupations?
Other targets are curiously inoffensive, but on reflection one can have a surfeit of Ed Sheeran, hydrangeas, book clubs, bed cushions and things with LOVE written on them.
Given he’s an aristo who is, ahem, “in trade”, Haslam is sufficiently leather-hided to set himself up as an arbiter of what’s U and non-U [the U stands for upper class]. At 84, he still makes his living ordaining pelmet swagging and ottoman placement for the very rich, and can découpage your armoire as soon as look at you. But his defenders are right to say he punches up rather than down. A true snob would list things like EastEnders, pork scratchings and Hello! – not conservatories, baby showers, space travel and podcasts.
To an egalitarian New Zealand sensibility, the word “common” does have troublesome connotations, but Haslam’s mischief with it pales beside the British government’s. It has just appointed a minister for common sense. There’s no actual ministry, budget or policy goals, but lots of anti-woke, “PC gone mad!” tub-thumping is anticipated from the inaugural appointee, Esther McVey.
Pedants have pointed out that the role is semantically self-negating, since if good sense was indeed common, there would be no need to have a minister to enforce it.
As political gimmicks go, it has the twin virtues of being cheap and accountability-free.
Haslam was not considered for the role, so people’s scented candles and Spanish holidays are safe for now. But he surely has, in McVey, an early contender for his 2024 tea-towelling.
