Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The cult of clean

I should feel sympathetic to the new cult of cleanliness. Instead it repulses me

How clean are you? I ask not as a mother confessor. I’m not interested in the state of your soul. What I want to know is: how clean is your sock drawer? Your fridge? Your gut?

These are the pressing questions of the new cult of clean. Its apostles urge us to divest ourselves of worldly possessions, to renounce ‘dirty’ food and alcohol and to dress in monkish grey or bleached white. Our sins are these: we have bought too much tat, eaten to filthy excess and stuffed our wardrobes with cheap, disposable rubbish.

The clean cultist says no more. Everything must go. The most high and holy of the clean cultists is Marie Kondo, Japanese author of The Life-changing Magic of Tidying. She asks us to take everything we own — from family heirloom to gas bill — hold it in our hands and demand of it: does it ‘spark joy’? If not, throw it out. Her tidying regimes and devoted following have seen her listed in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. Her name has become a verb: ‘to Kondo’ — to have an almighty clearout.

Spreading the gospel from the West is the Californian clutter refusenik Bea Johnson. Her book Zero Waste Home preaches the five Rs: ‘Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot.’ We are told to chuck or give away our books, our children’s toys — even our engagement rings. She cleans everything in the house with a dilute solution of white vinegar.

Completing the clean-and-clear trinity is the trend forecaster James Wallman. Clean cultists have read his manifesto Stuffocation: Living More with Less via iPad, learned its lessons, and consigned it to the desktop trashcan. Clean cultists don’t do physical books, CDs or DVDs.

They nodded when the handbag designer Orla Kiely announced: ‘The world is full of stuff, and it is too much.’

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