The bed. Tracey Emin made it art. Taylor Swift made hers the backdrop for the cover of her latest album. At Milan design week in April, high-fashion designer Thom Browne staged a performance based around the idea of making a perfect one. It is a place for sleep and for theatre and – no surprise – it is also a site for consumerism.
I am not above it. Blame the algorithm that constantly serves up fancy bedding brands or me for hovering a moment too long over ocean green linen sheets I can’t afford, but I, like many around me, am a sucker for the luxe bed sheets and accoutrements that have been blossoming in the last few years.
From soft brushed cotton to aspirationally rough linen; ticking stripes to bold, Instagram feed-friendly colours; scalloped-edges to the renaissance of the dust-collecting valance, beds are big business beyond the foundational mattress and frame. The domestic equivalent of picking what to wear, what you dress your bed in would ideally suit a mood, a season; it is an important part of the domestic jigsaw just as much – if not, arguably, more – than your sofa, kitchen tiles or rugs.
Cult brand Tekla is a frontrunner. Its towels and bathrobes are beloved of the likes of Harry Styles but it’s the bedding that is the backdrop of countless Instagram shots of perfectly styled bedrooms. This week it is launching its latest aspirational print in collaboration with heritage Finnish furniture manufacturer Artek – a collection of bedding inspired by pioneering architect and designer Aino Aalto featuring a Japanese cherry blossom motif.
At Toast, bed linen sales are up in general, but it is for the more “elevated styles” that demand is growing in particular, such as pillowcases with tie details and embroidered motifs. At Piglet in Bed, gingham and striped linen are proving hot property. Camomile London has seen a rise in customers buying more individual items for their beds beyond the duvet cases, such as their Kantha quilts. They don’t come cheap, but they sell out the quickest.
“The pandemic really made people fall in love with their homes again,” says Amy Hemmings-Batt, director of Coco&Wolf, a company that takes Liberty fabrics and makes them into duvet covers and pillowcases. “As such, we saw a shift in the investment people make into key pieces which elevate their every day.”
It aligns neatly with the booming sleep industry – on the one hand, the late-stage capitalism version of selling sand at the beach; on the other, a helpful answer to widespread sleep deprivation. As breathing robot sleep aids and aural apps that create soundscapes to optimise sleep have become part of the bedtime equation, it makes perfect sense that bedding itself would also become ripe for luxe-ification.
The focus on our beds also fits snugly with a wider mood. When Ottessa Moshfegh published My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel about a young woman orchestrating a year-long pharmaceutical-induced sleep, in 2018 it could have been a clarion call for the bed rotting ethos that would percolate online before becoming a so-called movement last year.
A TikTok trend, bed rotting involves staying in bed for long periods of time, often eating carefully curated snacks and consuming carefully curated media. At its sharper extremes, commentators grapple with a perceived glamourisation, or at least tactless casualisation, of the kind of serious mental health problems that can make getting out of bed an impossibility. At its rounder, more capitalist-friendly edges, bed rotting could read more like a luxuriant doctrine for the kind of elevating of beds that perfectly tallies with spending on elevated bedding. Many TikTok creators link to the sheets and blankets in which they are strategically “rotting” in their videos.
See thebedwitch for a pioneer of the genre, who has amassed over 13m likes on her account, largely documenting her time spent horizontal surrounded by trinkets and candles. “Hot girl season is over we are now strictly delicate Victorian bedridden widow energy,” she wrote in 2022.
While life with a toddler makes bed rotting for the most part feel like an out-of-reach Xanadu, the idea of getting into bed for an extended period of time with some nice sheets feels like a more attainable treat. Either crisp, white and seersucker, or a striped set made of the soft jersey usually found on a vintage T-shirt and topped with a heavy wool blanket bought on a whim from Brixton market but treasured for a decade since, I wouldn’t resent you accusing me of overthinking my bedsheets. But then again, if the explosion of posh bedding brands in the last half-decade is anything to go by, I know many of you do it too.
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