24 ***^ Wednesday 24 July 2019 The Daily Telegraph
FEATURES
A
s a child, Tan France was
terrified he would enrage
God if he ever kissed
another man. Raised in
a strict Muslim family
in Doncaster, he went
to the mosque every day, socialising
only with other Muslims, and was
banned from watching Western films
that encouraged “love marriages”.
The word “gay” was never uttered in
his house, so he feared from a young
age that his sexuality would prove
controversial.
He tells this story in his new
autobiography, Naturally Tan,
to give the reader a sense of how
unlikely it was that, 25 years later,
he would become the star of a
globally successful Netflix series
called Queer Eye, inspired by the
Noughties version Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy, in which five gay men
give a “whole-life makeover” to a
stylistically challenged volunteer.
France is responsible for revamping
the wardrobes of the show’s guests,
which is no longer limited to “straight
guys”, having featured women, drag
queens and trans men, too.
An emotionally reserved designer
who has, by his own admission,
never been particularly cool, theTan France, the British-born star of TV
makeover show Queer Eye, tells Luke Mintz
why he’s a traditionalist at heart
He’s the world’s
most famous
gay Muslim
series has transformed France into an
international celebrity who now gets
mobbed on the London Underground.
“My husband thinks it’s insane,”
he tells me, speaking with a soft
Yorkshire accent, intact after six
years living in the United States (in
Utah). “The amount of times he says
to a person having a full-on freak-out:
‘It’s just Tan...’ I don’t think he’ll ever
understand it.”
His popularity stems in part from
being Queer Eye’s “bad cop”, routinely
delivering damning verdicts on
participants’ outfits; he recently told
one that he was dressed “like a skater
boy from 1995”. France is fond of
advising that male participants own
at least three pairs of jeans and never
go near cargo trousers, and is credited
with having coined the term “French
tuck”, a simple, smart-casual styling
trick that involves tucking-in one shirt
front panel but leaving the back out.
By some metrics, France (born
Tanveer Safdar), has drifted far from his
South Yorkshire moorings. He swears
by a grooming regime that involves
using mouthwash 10 times a day, plus
a homemade Greek yogurt face mask
applied with a green tea bag.
But he insists that his upbringing
instilled in him a small-c conservatismthat he has retained to this day. He
doesn’t drink or dance, and despises
nightclubs. Except for his husband,
he didn’t know any gay people until
he joined the programme last year,
differentiating him sharply from his
co-stars, Jonathan Van Ness, Karamo
Brown, Bobby Berk and Antoni
Porowski, all of whom better fit the
exuberant, “out and proud” mould that
is now expected of gay men on TV.
France doesn’t appear particularly
plugged into the world of “woke”
LGBT politics, either. In one episode
last year, the so-called “Fab Five” help
a man who has undergone gender
reassignment surgery, and an awkward
France is shown asking which
pronouns he should use.
“I definitely would say I’m slightly
more conservative than anyone else
on the show, especially coming from
Utah. If I was living in one of the coastal
states, where there’s a larger LGBT
community, I think that I would have
been in a different position.”
France’s traditional outlook has
driven his fashion career. Too many
young designers are desperate to
become the next Alexander McQueen,he thinks, but ordinary people need
clothes that make them happy, too.
After studying fashion at Doncaster
College, he spent years trying to break
into the industry before eventually
creating his own label, Kingdom &
State, aimed at Mormon women.
“I wanted to create something that
was more stylish, so the pieces would
be cool, commercial clothes that just so
happened to cover the parts of the body
that Mormon women had to cover,”he writes in his book. The company
also gave him more reason to emigrate
to Salt Lake City, home to the world’s
largest Mormon community. There,
lived his long-distance boyfriend Rob,
a nurse and former Mormon whose
family ran a cowboy ranch, whom he
first met on a work trip in 2008. They
married in 2013, and now live together
in Utah. France’s family did not attend
his wedding but, he says, since the
Queer Eye series began, have begun to
acknowledge Rob by name.
His fashion ventures were a success,
and by his mid-30s he was ready to
sell-up and retire. But then Netflix
came knocking, asking him to audition
for Queer Eye. He was sceptical, but
Rob persuaded him to give it a go.
At the audition, France and 41 other
gay men descended on a Los Angeles
hotel for a three-day “chemistry test”.
He was something of a fish out of
water: he refused the director’s request
to “Americanise” when on camera,
and struggled with some of the other
auditionees, including Van Ness, the
ultra-flamboyant grooming expert who
went on to be his co-star. “He came up
to me and started talking very loudlyabout his intimate life... he had so
much personality. I didn’t think we
would get along.” (They later became
close friends.)
Once filming began, France
initially struggled to keep up with
the extroverted ways of his American
castmates; at least one person cries in
every episode, and phrases like “your
journey” and “being your best self ”
are used frequently. “I don’t share as
much emotionally as the other cast.
I’m very much British. My intonation,
my inflections, may have changed,
but I find that [Americans] are more
emotionally in-tune with themselves.
I’ve loosened up in the last two years,
and at one point you see me cry in
season three. That’s something I
thought would never happen,” he says.
There is one topic that France is
particularly loath to discuss: religion.
Raised in a family with a “profound
cultural connection” to Islam, France
is arguably the most famous openly
gay Muslim in the Western world. He
says it “feels really powerful” to hold
that accolade, but dislikes discussing
his faith in any more depth. “I’m
hyper-aware that when I speak, I
don’t just speak for me,” he explainsin his book. “The press reminds me
that everything I say becomes either
the voice of the gay community or
the voice of South Asian [or] Middle
Eastern men. I was never going to be
just Tan France, always ‘Tan France,
the gay British Muslim’. Religion
was something I never wanted to
talk about and still don’t. That’s too
personal a path.”
Indeed, a few weeks after our
interview, the headlines are all about
Parkfield Community School in
Birmingham, where a predominantly
Muslim group of parents launched
a drawn-out protest against a series
of lessons on gay equality. As a gay
British Muslim, France is well-placed
to pass comment... but he remains
tight-lipped, his publicist telling me he
“won’t have time” to discuss the issue.
Despite initial hiccups, France now
seems to have found his Queer Eye
groove. The fourth series, which is
available to watch now, exhibits him
at his best: reserved, unapologetically
British, and comfortable in his own
skin. “I don’t do slapstick, I don’t
do over the top – I do snarky. I’m
not American. Brits don’t love to be
cheesy – and I’m not willing to be
someone else.”TV’s Fab Five: Tan
France, main, and
with his Queer Eye
co-stars, leftCouple: Tan France with Rob, his husband
of six years, whom he met on a work trip‘Religion was
something I never
wanted to talk
about, and still don’t’
Can I get you another anti-bac
wet wipe, Ms Campbell?
S
upermodel Naomi Campbell
has always been a poster
girl, not simply for global
brands such as Louis Vuitton
and L’Oreal, but for doing
whatever the hell she wants.
This week, the 49-year-old posted
a YouTube video of her
fastidious in-flight hygiene
regime, aboard a Qatar
Airlines flight to Doha. The
video, which promptly went
viral and has been viewed
more than a million times,
shows her donning a pair of
latex gloves, whipping out
a pack of Dettol wipes and
scrubbing down armrests,
the screen, remote control
and “anything you can put
your hands on”.
“This is what I do on every
plane I get on,” Campbell
explains, cheerfully. “I do
not care what people think
of me. It’s my health and it
makes me feel better.”
As a travel writer, I have
to admit she’s got a point. I
tried to be relaxed about the
in-flight habits of my fellow
passengers, accepting that
we’re all free to do whatever
gets us through the next 10 hours.
But that was before their behaviour
became too, well, relaxed. And by
“relaxed”, I mean “disgusting”.
I once had to have a word with a
flight attendant when the gentleman
next to me spent the duration of The
Hangover III inserting the corner
of his in-flight blanket into his left
nostril, like a traumatised toddler. She
took one glance and kindly moved
me to a new row. I’ve asked the
passenger behind me to please refrain
from tickling my elbows with their
toenails, as his feet steadily slithered
up my armrests from behind. And
I’ve asked the man sitting next to me
in business class to please trim his
beard elsewhere as chunks of his DNA
landed like confetti on my breakfast
tray.
The @passengershaming Instagram
account, with nearly one million
followers, diligently documents
similar travel travesties, such as thefault Campbell when she tucks in a
bubblegum-pink seat cover to spare
her Burberry loungewear contact
with grotty airline upholstery,
parades her plastic bag of face masks
for “hydration”, and finally models a
silken surgical face mask.
“No matter what plane you take,
private or commercial, as the plane
descends, people start coughing
and sneezing,” she observes. “And
I just can’t, so this is my protection
from people coughing and
sneezing.”
I come from a family of
gung-ho and eminently
practical medics and
accordingly try to be realistic
and non-phobic about germs
and health risks, but I do now
travel with a small bottle of Dr
Bronner’s Lavender Organic
Hand Sanitizer (£3.99; shop.
drbronner.co.uk) and some
reusable hand and face wipes
(from £7; cheekywipes.com),
because I try to keep the
health of the planet in mind
as well as my own health
on holiday. And I find yoga
slippers, with a rubberised
sole, are a comfy option which
spares my fellow passengers
a show of feet. Inhaling
De Mamiel
Altitude
Oil (£30;
demamiel.com)
creates the
illusion that
I’m in a swish
health spa, and
not a gravity-
defying Petri
dish.
And don’t
think that
being on the
pricier side of
the red curtain quarantines you from
travelling germs.
Over the years, I’ve observed
the behaviour in business class
to be decidedly less classy than
in economy. Some business class
passengers seem to think they’ve
paid their way to not giving a damn
about anyone else. In economy
class, generally speaking, a more
community-oriented spirit prevails,
because there’s a sense that we’re
all in this unpleasant thing together.
And, as Naomi Campbell appears to
appreciate, rich people’s germs really
are no better than anyone else’s.hairy businessman sprawling butt-
naked as he sleeps, the woman drying
bikini bottoms underneath an air vent,
a feckless passenger using their feet
to operate the touchscreen, and the
oddly creepy but commonplace act
of flipping one’s long hair over the
headrest so it entirely veils the movie
screen of the passenger behind them.
Last year, insurancequotes.com
conducted swab tests on three
airlines and at three major airports.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most
revolting source of germs was theflush button in the
lavatory, harbouring more
than 95,000 germ colony-
forming units (CFUs).
More alarmingly, the tray
in front of us was found to
serve up 11,595 CFUs.
Other culprits are seat belt buckles,
airport self-check-in screens and gate
bench armrests. It’s all the more bleak
when we compare this to the average
CFU count on a household lavatory
seat: 172.
Given the grimness, it’s hard to‘Trimming his beard
next to me, chunks
of his DNA landed on
my breakfast tray’
As the supermodel unveils
her extreme inflight routine,
Anna Hart reveals some of
the horrors she’s witnessedPrepare for take-off: Naomi
Campbell’s pre-flight
cleaning routine this weekCHRISTOPHER SMITH/NETFLIX; EYEVINEQueer Eye is on Netflix. Naturally Tan by
Tan France (Virgin Books, £16.99) is
out now. To buy for £14.99 at books.
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