Pillow Talk

I kind of like that pillows can make you feel a little bit like you're underwater.

You know, when you're underwater and you feel like the water's sort of supporting you and there's no gravity.

I like pillows to sort of recreate that feeling.

Susie Lyons is a brand strategist, though that's not why I'm speaking with her.

I am a pillow enthusiast.

I wanted Susie's help understanding something that I've been wondering about for a a long time.

I would say my pillow collection is vast.

I have 11 pillows on my bed,

but it's a big bed.

A few years ago, in my capacity as Slates TV critic, I watched hours and hours of HGTV, a cable channel that specializes in reality shows about real estate.

Shows about people looking for homes, flipping homes, redecorating homes, shows like House Hunters and Fixer-Upper, not to mention the shorter videos published on their site and on YouTube.

All of these series are slightly different, but on every single one, I was totally distracted by the same thing.

Whenever they got to the part of the show where the house was finished, when it had been fixed or flipped or redecorated, there would be so many pillows on the beds.

Start with the pillows and shams, standard or European like I'm using here.

Now add pillows and standard shams if you want to use both.

Lastly, your sleeping pillows.

And for an extra special touch, add a decorative pillow.

This really gives your bed a luxurious look.

By the end of this video, there are eight pillows at the top of the bed and an additional two at the foot.

Decorative pillows, which for the purposes of this episode I'm defining as any pillow you don't sleep on, bring a lot of people pleasure and they can really snazz up a room.

They do not seem like the kind of thing a reasonable person should have strong feelings about one way or another.

But watching HGTV, I discovered when it comes to pillows, I am not a reasonable person.

You want to know how many pillows I have on my bed?

Yeah.

Four.

Regular pillows that are all like.

Four you?

Nope.

Two each.

What?

And I am not alone.

My sister calls it Mount Plushmore.

And she finds the pillows oppressive if she ever has to stay at my house and dogs it.

Oppressive.

Those are her words.

When I see a bed hiding beneath an avalanche of pillows, beneath sleeping pillows and square pillows and pillows shaped like hard candies, beneath bolsters and wedges and shams and Euro shams, beneath pillows that are not for sleeping on.

I just wonder, what are all those things for?

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Every month we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

The decorative pillow has been around for a long time, but in the last decade or two, it has come to colonize furniture across the country like never before.

The rise of the decorative pillow is due to a host of forces, including designers, manufacturers, retailers, catalogs, social media, globalism, e-commerce, and also television, which has done more than anything to boost Americans' desire for pillows.

On home decor shows, the pillow is a symbol of luxury, comfort, decadence, coziness, and self-care.

But to others, it's just another example of consumerist excess.

And I want to say up front that going into this episode, that was me, the consumerist excess person.

Decorative pillows always seemed kind of silly to me, but talking to people about pillows made me gain a new respect for them.

The decorative pillow may be a colorful bit of replaceable fluff that ends up on the floor a lot, but it's also a rabbit hole into the enormous question of how we form our taste.

Of the way that intensive marketing, a cheap global supply chain, and personal preference influence the thousands upon thousands of small choices we make about the stuff that literally lives with us.

So today, I'm decodering a little doozy.

How did decorative pillows take over our homes?

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To get a sense of just how big pillows are as a commercial phenomenon, you just have to turn on your TV.

And these, look how beautiful the combinations of them are together.

So you get, yes.

That's the Oscar-winning actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, who has her own line of pillows, which she sells regularly on QVC.

The pillows she sells are round and ruched and come in washed-out pastels with names like Sea Glass and Ashes of Rose.

They look like fussy pincushions, and on one side, they have a large plastic faux gem at their center.

A pair costs between $20 and $30.

And this just, this is glamorous.

Yeah, this is just glamorous.

He loves glamour.

We really do.

You can mix them with other pillows that you have.

They just, and what I love about them is that, you know, the pillow shape, the regular.

Zeta Jones sells thousands of pillows in each of these segments.

And that's just a tiny part of the decorative pillow economy, which I'm distinguishing from the crowded marketplace that sprung up around sleeping pillows, which I'm not really going to touch on in this episode.

Decorative pillow purveyors include QVC, boutiques, upscale chains, big box providers of increasingly stylish fast home decor like Target, and online emporiums like Amazon, which all provide pillows to customers who have been primed by experts, Pinterest, Instagram, and reality shows on channels like HGTV, TLC, and Bravo to think of the throw pillow as the perfect finishing touch.

They're definitely more of a thing, I think, than they ever have been.

Jonathan Adler is a designer of many things, including pillows.

Susie has one of his pillows in the shape of an S on her bed.

I would like to think that I actually am something of a pillow pioneer.

About, I think it's at least 21 years ago, I came out with my first line of pillows.

They became a sensation.

I sold a ton of them.

Since I became a pillow purveyor, pillows have definitely,

definitely multiplied, taken off, and they're just a squillion of them.

As a businessman who has made money on pillows, and as a designer who puts a lot of thought and care into them, that first line of pillows he mentioned was hand-loomed in alpacy arm by Peruvian artisans.

You might think Adler, of all people, would be all about fitting as many pillows on a bed as he possibly could.

Do you like have a prescriptive feeling when it comes to pillows, like about the amount number of pillows a person should actually have on their bed?

If I'm being honest, the like the march of pillows down a bed

does

seem extremely contrived to me if i'm being honest i don't want to be so i actually have usually i have like um four sleeping pillows and maybe one pillow um

in front of them that kind of is the punctuation mark adler may be abashed but he has company in reporting the story i spoke with a number of people with similarly conflicted feelings about pillows I have become so allergic to this row pillow.

With decorative pillows, you get a little cringy.

I think I do get anxiety about where to put them.

I want to be clear here that all of these people have at least one decorative pillow in their house, if not more.

They're ubiquitous, even among people who kind of roll their eyes about them.

In fact, they're ubiquitous among people who feel far more strongly about them than that.

For the hundreds of thousands of videos, Instagram posts and Pinterest pages that celebrate pillows, there are a smattering of people with a decidedly anti-decorative pillow stance.

Typically, men carping about their female partner's pillow use.

This sort of gendered conflict about the pillow has been going on for years.

What is this?

It's a cushion.

Right.

This is a scene from the British sitcom Coupling, which aired in the early 2000s.

Now, I just need to know, on behalf of all men everywhere, I just need to ask, please, what are they for?

Look at them.

Look at the chubby little bastards just sitting around everywhere.

What are they?

Pets for chairs?

Come on.

This character's ridiculous anger, his resentment, his sexist argument that logical men like function, while silly women like superfluous pillows, stems from the fact that though he does not understand cushions, he has to live with them anyway.

And that's even more true today than it was when coupling was on TV.

The decorative pillow, in other words, has conquered even its haters.

How did that happen?

To understand how the decorative pillow conquered contemporary upholstery, we have to go back in time.

You might assume that the decorative pillow is a descendant of the sleeping pillow, but though they are both soft, squishy objects often found on beds, they are distantly related, springing from different sources and coming to resemble each other only over a period of thousands of years.

The first sleeping pillows appeared around 5000 BC in Mesopotamia and shortly after in ancient Egypt.

They were practical objects made of hard substances, rock, wood, ceramic, that were used by the very rich to keep their heads off of floors and free of insects.

And they are not really the antecedent of the decorative pillow, which instead descends from the cushion, which began appearing in Egypt around 2700 BC.

So a cushion kind of comes from

kings had chairs and everybody else sat on the floor.

And this sort of was the intermediate step between floor and being a king.

Annie Coggan is a principal designer with Chairs and Building Studio in Brooklyn and an associate professor at Pratt Institute, School of Design.

For millennia, the cushion remained a status object of the very wealthy, found largely in royal courts, and this didn't begin to change until the Industrial Revolution.

Because the bulk of television and movies are about the very upper classes,

And because we, the middle classes, have so much stuff,

we just assume everybody always did.

Judith Flanders is a social historian and author whose work focuses mostly on the 19th century lives of the British middle classes.

The rooms were almost empty.

They wouldn't have had all this stuff.

According to Judith, we know that in Pennsylvania and Delaware in the 1790s, just 8%,

8% of households even had sleeping pillows, and that was typical for the time.

But as mass-produced textiles became available for the first time, decorative pillows flooded into Victorian-era homes on a larger tide of home furnishings.

The home decor of that period is known for being intricate.

Think lots of upholstery and doilies and tassels.

And embroidering pillows with mottos and flowers even became a popular hobby, a kind of Victorian DIY project.

Heading into the 20th century though, there was a backlash to all of this.

The pendulum began to swing away from maximalism and towards minimalism, or to put it in design terms, towards modernism.

And though it would swing back and forth a number of times throughout the 20th century, by the Depression decades leading up to the Second World War, the decorative pillow had decidedly gone out of style.

So now I want to turn to how it came back in.

There are a lot of factors that changed everything for the pillow in the post-World War II era: rising economic prosperity, the availability of cheap synthetic fabrics and fills, the polyesters of the world, and television.

Photos, especially like in magazines, photos of sort of living rooms in the 1930s and 40s.

You just see brocade couches, sort of Victorian-style couches, kind of that like depression-era sofa.

Rebecca Lavoy is the host of HGTV and Me, a podcast about watching HGTV.

She's also the co-host of Slate's Mom and Dad are fighting, among other podcasts.

She's always been very interested in design and attentive to pillows in particular.

And what you don't see is a lot of throat pillows on those couches, and in many cases, you don't see any.

If you look at Back Issues of Architectural Digest, which was founded in 1920, you see that well into the 1950s, homes had very few decorative pillows in them.

Sofas occasionally have one or two on them, and beds are even sparer.

Rebecca has a theory about why this changed.

My unifying theory of throw pillows is that television set design has influenced the American culture into believing that you cannot have a sofa without throw pillows on it.

On a classic sitcom, couches are front and center, the focal point of the set.

Rebecca thinks that the sitcom sofas of the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the couches on shows like I Dream of Jeannie and the Jeffersons, Mary Tyler Moore, and Growing Pains, taught Americans that a couch without throw pillows on it was incomplete.

The couch really is a central character in a lot of television shows.

Yeah.

And those couches all have throw pillows on them, with the notable exception of the Cosby show.

And it continues today.

Modern Family is basically a showcase of throw pillory if you look at the sets on that show.

As a TV critic, needless to say, I loved this theory and very much wanted it to be true.

So I called up some sitcom set designers to check it out.

John Schaffner is a production designer for multi-camera sitcoms who has worked on 52 series, including Golden Girl's Friends and Two and a Half Men.

Once it's made its way onto a television show, it probably got there because other people had them in their living rooms.

Sitcom sets are supposed to look more or less like real homes.

In other words, they they did not start to include throw pillows until real people had throw pillows.

So in this sense, Rebecca's theory is not quite right.

TV didn't introduce people to the decorative couch pillow.

They were already spreading as designers, manufacturers, advertisers, magazines, department stores, and other entertainments, like the movie Pillow Talk, which does have a lot of decorative pillows in it, pushed us away from the mid-century minimalism of the 1950s and early 60s into the maximalism of the 70s and 80s.

But if sitcoms weren't the first movers of couch pillows, if they didn't start the trend, I think Rebecca is right in thinking that they both amplified and solidified it.

You know, I think a lot of times people in the entertainment business, even though we start with story and character,

and then we're in the game of aspirational decoration and design.

So we take something and then add one more to it, you know?

Sitcom couches created a kind of pillow feedback loop with sets inspired by how real people lived going on to inspire those same real people to buy more throw pillows.

But as influential as the sitcom sofascape was, it would be a mistake to think of it as the only influence.

Rather, it was one of many, one part of the feedback loop.

And you can see that in, well, sitcom set design itself.

Somewhere in the late 90s, we went into a whole style we used to call restoration hardware, or it would be catalog furniture, we call it too.

Bill Brzezewski is also a production designer.

He now works on feature films, but he worked on 800 episodes of multi-camera sitcoms like Alan and Growing Pains.

HD TVs come along, and

those shows are designed to show you how, where to get the stuff.

You know what I mean?

It's basically,

that's their sales tools.

That's what those shows are.

I mean,

sitcoms were, we didn't think of it like that in the beginning.

Sitcoms were trying to show viewers a realistic, if aspirational home, not to sell them stuff.

But it turns out that displaying aspirational homes homes to millions of TV viewers is a great way to do just that.

So you can guess what happened when TV started trying to make us buy pillows on purpose.

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We're now entering the modern age of pillow consumption, which has been made possible by a lot of factors.

Globalism, e-commerce, cheap materials, and labor that have made affordable and reasonably well-designed home goods more accessible than ever before.

But when it comes to what is driving our taste in pillows, what most influences what we want and what we want it to look like, I don't think anything matches the power of home decorating TV.

The first home decor show, PBS's This Old House, premiered in 1979.

Bob, what's the condition of that roof up there?

Not too good.

It's an old metal roof that's just been covered over with tar paper.

Probably have to rip it off.

I don't like that metal with the tar over it.

This genre didn't really take off until the early aughts, when reality TV itself became a television staple.

At this time, the turn of the millennia, before print and retail had been destabilized by the internet, home decor magazines and catalog-based furnishing companies were flourishing.

Consumers were already very interested in interior design and getting their houses just so, and reality TV tapped into this.

The breakout show in this first wave of home decor series, a wave that included house hunters and extreme makeover home edition, was TLC's Trading Spaces.

All right, let's recap the rules.

You guys know what they are, right?

Thousand dollars, two days, you share a carpenter, you spend the night, you don't see the room until the end of day two when you switch back, bladda yada yada.

All right, so we're gonna trade keys.

As with all home decor shows, Trading Spaces was meant to give you ideas and inspiration about things you could do to and buy for your own space.

We're having more pillows out of this too.

And this goes on top of the white, so it's white, a little bit of orange.

How many of these do you need?

What I learned from watching that show that was very much in my formative home buying years, I bought my first house in 1999.

Rebecca Lavoy again.

You know, what I learned from that back in the day when I was, you know, living on a shoestring in our tiny first house was that was the way to make a room pop.

Like Hildy and Lori and Vern and Genevieve told me so.

So buy the couch I can afford and then go to Crate and Barrel to buy the really nice pillow to make it sing, you know?

I totally learned that from that show.

Trading Spaces was just the beginning for pillows.

Its message was reinforced on show after show, where pillows serve both a clear design function and play a more emotional role as the accessory that pulls the room together, the cozy aspirational item you need to make a house a home.

And this message, it has traveled.

I do feel like with clients, it is talked about way too often and for way too long.

Genevieve Gorder is an interior designer who has had a number of shows on HGTV and who was also one of the original designers on Trading Spaces.

Most people who aren't designers feel like they understand decorative pillows and that's like something they need to discuss at nine o'clock at night.

When I spoke with people about decorative pillows I was struck by the kind of shared vocabulary they had for them.

Everyone seemed to know exactly what they're for.

It's an easy way to you know transform the look of a room for not a lot of money.

Rooms should have like accent moments and I think pillows decorative pillows on the couch are like the prime way of doing that.

Yeah, and of course, it's a nice, cheap, easy way

of bringing a little sort of designerly or

thinking about pillows like this insulates them from the charge of being useless because it gives them a function.

They're the easy, relatively affordable way to elevate a room.

But with its focus on price point and utility, this language isn't just design speak.

It's a sales pitch.

You put this

and it just mixes the bed up.

You know, it just, the dimensions of it just makes it look so finished.

Okay, so I'm not sure.

HETV and other home decor shows have boosted the average American's design literacy enormously, made regular people more attentive to and familiar with interior design.

But it's also turned us into salesmen, selling stuff to ourselves.

The decorative pillow has more going for it than attractiveness, ease, and price point, though.

There's nothing softer, there's nothing more luxurious than having down against your body and the ability.

Luxury is a word you hear a lot when talking about decorative pillows, particularly bed pillows.

You know, a super affordable pillow can make you feel luxurious, or it's like a robe.

Susie Lyons, again, right?

There's no one actually like physically needs a robe, but there's something that feels sort of nice and like you're taking an extra step or, you know,

a little bit more care, and you feeling comfortable as you're going through getting ready for work.

The bed pillow, even more than the couch pillow, is associated with a kind of decadence.

This is one of the reasons why hotels tend to completely overdo them.

They want you to know that they are trying to pamper you, even if it's to the point of over-pampering.

Another reason for this kind of ostentatious pillow display is that the more pillows you can see, the more you are likely to buy.

In private homes, though, where even pillow levers tend to be more restrained, pillow use feels a little more wholesome.

Taking the time to get your bed pillows just so is something that you're doing for yourself.

At a cultural moment when time feels like the thing we never have enough of, when time feels like the ultimate luxury, taking a few minutes out of your day to make your bed might feel to some people less like a chore and more like an extravagance.

But the luxurious decorative pillow exists in a larger context too, the context of the luxurious everything.

When I was growing up,

rich people had pretty Spartan homes.

Jonathan Adler again.

You know, like kitchen counters were made of formica,

bathroom counters were made of formica.

There wasn't, there just wasn't sort of the fetishization of luxury in every element of one's home.

A lot of this focus on luxury has to do with accessibility, with the proliferation of retail choices.

If historically the luxury item was something something it was hard to get because it was unavailable or prohibitively expensive, now it's just about finding the thing you like most at your price point.

Affordable luxury, which is often the same as disposable luxury.

Having lots of beautiful, soft things on your bed is genuinely kind of luxurious.

But the pillow is also just another piece of trendy consumer detritus, made with who knows what labor practices and materials.

Its very selling point is that it's replaceable.

You're not stuck with the pillow forever or even for very long.

It's another item in the stream of stuff flowing into and out of our homes, a purely aesthetic object that we don't need, but it has come to feel like we do if we don't want our couch to look weirdly naked.

Working on this piece, I kept thinking about pineapples.

Specifically, this pineapple blanket that I have on my bed.

It's a quilted white coverlet with the outline of pineapples embroidered into it in pink thread.

A few years ago, I saw it on Anthropology's website and I thought, oh, I like that.

And then I started noticing that pineapple print stuff was everywhere on shirts, on kids' clothes, on home goods, notebooks, lamps.

And honestly, I liked most of it.

And that creeped me out.

How did they, whoever they is, know that I would like pineapples so much?

How did they know before I did, did they make me like pineapples?

I don't know what your equivalent of this is.

Some other fruit print, succulents, gallery walls, mason jars, pillows, but you probably have one.

This feeling that market forces, tastemakers, trendsetters, companies, designers, Instagram, television are not just influencing your most personal aesthetic choices, but almost conjuring them.

It is a very weird feeling, but it has become a common one.

The pineapples reminded me that though I may be relatively immune to the charm of the throw pillow, I am not immune to the larger phenomenon of wanting stuff because someone has made you want it.

The pineapples also reminded me that I am not immune to our larger cultural fixation on nesting.

This is not the only moment in time that we've been fixated on getting our surroundings just so, often with the help of lots and lots of stuff.

I want to return momentarily to that historical group of pillow lovers, the Victorians.

Victorian design may look overdone and fussy to the modern eye, but there was an intensity to it that might feel familiar.

Getting everything right where you live

is

just as frenetic as the Victorian

housewife who was, you know, putting toilies on any everything.

Annie Coggan again, a designer and associate professor at Pratt.

A need to control your space, to craft your space, is probably at the same level

and

urgency as the 19th century.

Whenever there's a big

kind of wellspring of uncontrollable ideas going on,

the natural inclination is to make your home

more

attractive.

When faced with huge changes in the world, the telegraph, the railroad, factories, the Victorians nested.

When the world outside your home is wild and scary and crazy, you can, at the very least, control your immediate surroundings.

You can cope with lots of pillows, or you can cope with just one to three exactingly chosen ones.

If the home decor craze is about exerting control over one of the very few things that we can, that solves what I came to think of as the real mystery of the pillow, which isn't why so many people are putting them on their beds, but why so many people have strong feelings about pillows one way or another.

The pillow champion and the pillow skeptic, the pillow maximalist and the pillow minimalist are more alike than they are different because they both care very much about the look of their space.

Hating pillows, after all, is just another way of caring about them.

Okay, what if one of your children developed a real love of pillows?

I would, I would like support her, but also find it very alienating.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to June Thomas, Michael Hines, Whitney Robinson, Deborah Needleman, Jonsara Ruth, Wendy Goodman, Brian Lowder, Jeff Rooney, Colleen Rudy, Casey Jones, Greg Lovale, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you soon.

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