Linen everything

Wikipedia tells me that linen has been a thing since at least 30,000 years ago, so when I ask, “Ok, when did this linen thing start?” I hope you’ll take that question with a grain of salt. You know what I mean, right? Take, for example, the domestic set design for Season 1 of ER–my quarantine nostalgia trip–where nary a rumpled linen duvet can be glimpsed in the homes of the fictional TV medical professionals of 1994:

The mid-90s yuppie preference, if memory serves, was for the kinds of scratchy, colorful bedspreads you’d find in a 3-star hotel, and this is exactly what we see in the screenshots above. My mom had stuff like this. She bought it at outlets. She also had a really amazing set of queen-sized paisley sheets from the 70s that I stole when I was a teenager, and that my brother then stole when he moved into his first apartment in his early twenties, and then disappeared off the face of the earth (the sheets, that is; my brother is in Suffolk County). My point: I do not recall linen being a home design thing until the past five years or so, when there suddenly seemed to be a zillion sheet startups and Etsy stores located in former Eastern Bloc countries that will sell you almost anything made of linen (more on that in an upcoming RH&R series, tentatively titled “The Fault in Our Jumpsuits”) along with reams of online roundups of the Best Linen Sheets, the authors of which are the targets of my unending jealousy because they get to Princess-and-the-Pea all that bedding for free.

Anyway, I am all about the linen thing, and it’s pretty simple to explain why. Like, first-order logic simple: If x, then y.

x = Linen is the home decor equivalent of bourgeois bohemian fashion. It looks perpetually untidy and costs a fortune; it permits the affluent to live out their pastoral fantasies in cities and suburbs; it shrinks Marie Antoinette’s shepherdess pantomime down to the size of a downtown loft featured on the One Kings Lane website. It is, in short, a status item that is a status item because it pretends it’s not a status item.

y = I, like many other middle-aged urban professionals, spend my limited disposable income on status items that do not announce themselves as status items. Instead, they announce themselves as “oh, this old thing,” which permits me to dissemble my class aspirations and materialism under the guise of Timeless Quality when, really, I am just pretending to be a shepherd o’ the asphalt in an anxious attempt to confer authenticity upon the charade that is middle-aged urban professionalism.

It is incredibly frustrating to have this degree of self knowledge and yet, at the same time, feel in my heart of hearts that I CANNOT LIVE without these rust-colored Hawkins NY sheets:

A few years ago I made the mistake of purchasing the pillowcases in this set because I couldn’t afford the whole set, and now whenever I look at them I’m just reminded that I can’t afford the whole set. I then, at the behest of a podcast advertisement wielding a coupon code, bought the more affordable linen sheet bundle from Parachute in a pale “blush” color, which in retrospect was stupid because I had a baby at the time, and have since had another, so the sheets are now more like “blush spotted with stains from milk, poop, blood, and unknown (probably chocolate?) substances.” One might call this rustic. The linen sheets on Pinterest never have poop on them, but I’d be willing to bet that if I had actual sheep, there would be loads of poop all over the place. #authenticity