Life Stripped Bare: the naked truth isn’t all that interesting

“Well Marx, I’ve been reading your book,” said Engels, sitting in Marx’s cramped Soho study, chewing on his pipe (Engels was a hipster). “And I have a quibble.”

“Really Engels?” asked Marx eagerly. “Is it about the alienation of the labour class? The historical inevitability of the communist state? The confusing dream sequence in the middle? Or the bit where I fight the robot Kaiser?*”

(*I may not have actually read Das Kapital.)

Engels chuckled. “No, that stuff’s gold,” he said. “It’s just that, while we can pass most of this off as ...”. He made anachronistic scare quotations with his fingers. “... a ‘social experiment’, it lacks pizzazz.”

“Pizzazz,” repeated Marx, chewing nervously on his beard (Marx was also a hipster).

“I mean nudity,” said Engels. “It lacks nudity.”

"Does Das Kapital need nudity?" asked Marx.

“Well, if you want anyone to read it,” said Engels, peering over his two monocles (it was the olden days). “Did... did you want people to read it?”

And so a light bulb, or, if you insist, gas lamp, went on over Marx's head and Das Kapital got additional sexy bits and Engels got a job as commissioning editor at Channel 4.

Materialism in the nip
Channel 4 has long had a reputation for wrapping serious concepts in sensationalist packaging, so why would it be any different with Life Stripped Bare , a televised "social experiment" in which three households are stripped of everything they own and must reckon with materialism in the nip?

Not since the 1930s has material poverty been automatically aligned with nudity. In that era, hobos were regularly depicted wearing nothing but barrels (a look that’s probably currently being resurrected by some Stonybatter-dweller) and in this programme, 21st-century bohos hide their nudity with judiciously placed boxes and bags.

For the duration of this experiment, six shameless, affable and self-aware urbanites (two of them sing Material World by Madonna) have their possessions and clothing itemised and placed in a storage container from which they can reclaim one item every day.

“These households are stripping everything away,” says the narrator, “to find out what they really need to make them happy.”

I imagine clothes would make them very happy. There is a short period in which they can’t stop giggling nervously at their nakedness, but fashion designer Heidi quickly gets the hang of it. She clothes herself in leaves, befriends a snail and sleeps in the bath. “Both my bum bones are killing me,” she informs us.

Eventually they make a nude dash to storage facilities, where Heidi chooses a roll of fabric from which she fashions a toga-like dress, data-scientist Tom finds his dressing gown and photographer Laura dons a onesie. The next day they go to work like this. Their employers, who are not interviewed, presumably just roll their eyes and go “millennials, eh?”

Human vulnerability
The programme aims to answer many questions. Do our possessions define us? Do we need to have "stuff" to live a happy life? And what do naked people look like? The answers are: "sort of", "yes" and "cold".

Life Stripped Bare is most interesting as an exploration of human vulnerability. The bit where strangers help Heidi carry her mattress from the storage unit is sweet. It's touching when Laura curls up in her empty sitting room and says "I feel like a creature".

And it’s also nice that at the end they divest themselves of some of their stuff. “You don’t need pants to get by in life,” says Tom (okay, I’m quoting him out of context. As far as I know Tom wears pants now).

As an exploration of materialism, however, it’s not particularly deep. It all feels like it’s just part of the current vogue for decluttering. Quality of life today isn’t usually marked by a surplus or lack of stuff in general, but a surplus or lack of the good stuff – upward mobility, security, healthcare, education.

If you have security of employment and tenure, regular holidays and a sense of possibility, then purging your home of gewgaws is not a sign that you've ascended to a non-materialistic realm, but that you've succumbed to a middle-class fashion for keeping your capital liquid and/or having a storage unit. Life Stripped Bare is more Marie Kondo than Marx. The participants may represent a superior form of parsimony, but they're probably just naked.