Orlando Bloom has been photographed paddleboarding stark naked, accessorised only by his girlfriend, Katy Perry. There are several possible explanations for this. The first is that Bloom was felled by the prospect of putting on some trunks. Which of us, hand on heart, cannot sympathise? Who among us can claim that they have never balked at such a difficult and time-consuming process? Poor Perry must have got up at dawn to put her bikini on. Maybe she even started the night before, to be safe.
The second possibility is that Bloom didn’t realise he was being photographed, and will spend the coming weeks whingeing tediously about paparazzi intrusion. The problem with that argument is that Sardinia in August is not the destination of choice for people seeking privacy. It is not a place where celebrities can expect to be able to lark around starkers on paddleboards without anyone noticing.
Take George Clooney: he’s closeted away on Lake Como, not starkers in Sardinia. For an actor like Bloom, however, who is more famous for his girlfriends than his roles, Sardinia is the place to strip off if you want to be front page news. And if that is his logic, I salute him, because it means that gender equality has finally arrived, albeit in the form of a race, if you’ll excuse me, to the bottom. Women have been getting their kit off to attract attention for years. Maybe Bloom is just evening the score.
The third explanation is that male vanity has gone to the next level. Bloom has clearly put the hours in at the gym, he has the six-pack to prove it and he isn’t bashful about showing it off. He’s not alone. Newsagents’ shelves groan under the weight of glossy magazines with absurdly buff men on the cover. Male grooming products have gone from being a bit of a joke to an international £15 billion a year industry.
Mrporter.com — Net-a-Porter for men — last year reported a 300 per cent growth in sales of men’s beauty products. In the space of a generation, women have gone from laughing at the idea of a man having a pedicure to hoping secretly that he does (although I draw the line at manicures. There’s something very unsexy about a man with obviously manicured, buffed nails).
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I don’t care if a man uses moisturiser, but I do care if he nicks mine. The fact remains that, while a light tidy and dust-up is a welcome thing for men and women, looking as though you’ve tried too hard is incredibly unsexy. So, as Orlando Bloom proves, is letting it all hang loose. Put it away, love. Think of the sunburn.
Holiday packing isn’t easy
The single best thing about not going away on holiday this summer, which I’m not, is not having to pack. Every year, it’s a horror show in which my inadequacies are fuelled by glossy magazines.
On the plus side, I’m entirely immune to their endless beach-body-ready features, because “Seven days to abs of steel!’’ is clearly ridiculous, and my desire to eat spaghetti carbonara far outweighs my desire to be a size 8. Come to think of it, I don’t actually have any desire to be a size 8 at all.
No, my real beef is with the pernicious myth of the capsule wardrobe. Has any woman successfully achieved a capsule wardrobe? Given that it seems to consist, somewhat dispiritingly, of wearing only two colours and packing a lot of white T-shirts, did they wonder why they’d bothered? I know I would.
And when blathering on about the supposedly perfect holiday capsule wardrobe, why must they perpetuate the idea that a wide selection of accessories is an adequate substitute for clean clothes? They’re not.
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Statement necklaces will not mean you can wear the same trousers four days running and no one will notice. People will just think: “Oh, look. You’re wearing the same trousers for the fourth day running, but with a different necklace.” My advice? Ditch the accessories. Pack everything else. Or stay at home.
Why the Olympics bore me
In Rio today, athletes will be competing in rowing, swimming and beach volleyball. There will be coxless pairs and double sculls and fencing. I wish them all well. I salute their achievements. I will not be watching. It’s lonely being the only person who isn’t interested in the Olympics.
I watched a few hours of London 2012, but only because my boyfriend wanted to. I managed to watch not one single minute of the Beijing Olympics and I have every confidence I’ll be able to say the same of Rio. When you tell people this, they get cross, as if I’m somehow dissing the athletes. Of course I’m not. I’m just not interested, in the same way I’m not interested in Keynesian economic theory or the novels of George Eliot. If they want to run round a track all day, that’s up to them. Wake me up when it’s August 22.
Kevin Maher is away
