S l e e p e r

A Review of Porthault Sheets

How close can you come to the rich? Can you come close enough to touch their sleeping faces?

Holly Golightly might have dreamed of D. Porthault. Poor Holly: You'll recall Truman Capote never even let her get to Tiffany's for breakfast. She was born on a dirt floor in Arkansas, moved to an army cot off Fifth Avenue, and, as far as we know, vanished into a bedroll in a tent someplace in Africa. But if there had been a happy ending, it might have involved a private chambre with Porthault sheets. Capote supposedly said the real difference between rich people and everyone else is their champagne and their D. Porthault linens. Audrey Hepburn herself surely napped on them.

Jackie Onassis loved them; Catherine Deneuve has them; also Gwyneth Paltrow. And, guess who.

"That's so much merde."

No, Holly, it's true.

(Miss Golightly would have loved the tech geeks!)

To see these sheets for yourself, take the 6 train uptown and ring the buzzer of the small, silent shop on 69th, just off Madison. Through the glass door, down the few white-carpeted steps, you'll find the linens and coverlets coveted by — well, not many people yet, owing to their price ($2,400 for a queen set, to start), the fact that you only hear about them via whispered confidences, and, surely, their... ugliness?

"Très fou!"

Listen, Holly, I am just not feeling it.

I squinted hard at the scatterings of pink hearts, the lurid, but not quite lurid enough, flowers. I love Billy Baldwin. I get Dorothy Draper. But I can't make sense of this. Maybe a Lilly Pulitzer dimmed by decades of four gimlets every afternoon of middle age?

It's impossible to imagine sleeping, napping, or even passing out on these sheets. They are as stiff as new thousand-dollar bills. They feel like they would crack if you lay down on them.

The heart softens at the idea of the orders for custom sets of linens ($4,000 and up) for palaces, chateaux, the White House, Balmoral, all handwritten in smudged pencil on yellowing tablets and sticking out of ancient file cabinets. Porthault is one of France's Entreprises du Patrimoine Vivant, or companies of living heritage. Its looms, in a tiny northern town, in humid toil, somehow manage to produce these sheets of unsurpassable smoothness and amazing hideousness!

And yet: K-mart, is what they bring to mind.

"Darling, you need a more expensive imagination!"

No, I don't. But anyway this tiny artisanal company has been bought by Brazos*, a private equity group headed by a coupla Americans. "Porthault," principal Bernard Carl says, "is one of the most massively underexploited brands out there." (Quel cowboy.) The seamstresses who embroider those yawny scalloped edges will soon be filing into a shiny new factory in Rieux.

Brazos wants to take sales from $7 million to $75 million in seven years. So get ready for sheetsploitation, Frette-style: "hospitality" quality linens at boutique hotels, sample sales with made-in-China Porthault baby bibs, which by the way already exist. "You have no idea how much people are willing to pay for the `Made In France' label," says Bernard Carl.

What do you think about that, Holly?

"Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious, just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to. Oh, screw it, cookie — hand me my guitar."

I knew, in the end, that she wasn't the private equity type.

The irony of it all is that maybe Porthault will wind up with some better designs. Until that day, the verdict here must be: Fluff.

*In an odd twist, Brazos Group also now owns this writer's student loan.

Frette: Feh. End of Story.

Dear Sleepers:

There really is no reason to buy Frette.

After a bad experience with Frette's Brio sheets, manufactured strictly for hotels and sold at Bluefly and elsewhere on the Internet, I headed with a modicum of interest to the Frette sample sale. A brand with so many fans has to have some actual allure, right? Maybe the real sheets would win me over.

Uh, no. First of all, Frette's Hotel line, with its dully ladylike scalloped edge, clearly is meant to appeal to the "aspirational" buyer. It's their least espensive set, at around $420 retail ($250 at the sample sale).

Who is this aspirational sleeper? A Town & Country editorial assistant, on a wretched salary, smoking Black & Milds in her Upper East Side studio, with these thin, sheer sheets wrinkling beneath her thighs.

Oh. Girl. These are going to look terrible coming out of the dryer.

"They're only 200 thread count," a saleswoman offered defensively. There it is, the thread-count smokescreen. By now, I know you know it doesn't matter how many threads you weave into an inch of fabric. It matters what kind of threads you're weaving. Trust the "hand," the way the sheeting feels between your fingers. There are fine, silky 200 TC sheets. And then there are these.

In the more substantial, far pricer linens ($500 for a coverlet, and in the last hour of the sale??), the colors are bad, the colors are wrong, the colors are so prosaic. The editorial assistant has grown up and become Mrs. Goldman Sachs. She no longer works; she rises from a kingsize navy-and-camel bed each morning, checks The View, and — oh, hell, goes straight for the Old Granddad. There is no joy in Scarsdale.

Who would aspire to a pair of fifty-dollar cardboardy mules the color of mucilage? On a church-basement table. Does Frette understand the idea of a sample sale? Oh for Mella's, with it's cheap, swell flipflops.

On a recent visit to ABC's museum-worthy bedding department, I found Anichini sheets to be far superior. The hotel-style line was more substantial than Frette's, with a silker, softer hand. It wasn't any less expensive. But if you've got a classic sort of taste, and you (or the people perusing your wedding registry) are going to spring for this sort of thing, you should get what you pay for. There is no reason to be a fool for brand.

Sogni d'oro,
Sleeper

Memorable Sleeps: Our Parents' Bedrooms

Before there were high-thread-count sheets, before there were mattresses thick as hay bales, back when people got their percale at Kresge's, swapped car keys at parties, and would have thought Duvets sang covers on K-Tel, there were our parents' bedrooms. The beds, indifferently covered with bedspreads the color of dried parsley or Etch-a-Sketch screens, were only of interest for jumping on. Otherwise they lay empty as Mayberry on any old afternoon.

You got married, you got a trousseau with white, glass-covered casseroles, some crocheted potholders, some functional towels — monogrammed, maybe — and sheets, and pillows. What kind of pillows? Rectangular pillows. Bed pillows, daughter. White, rectangular pillows that slowly yellowed and turned to sacks of cement and were never replaced. (They became fearsome weapons in pillow fights with the occasional visiting cousin.)

What went on in that bedroom was not connected with the bed. What went on in that bedroom? The energies and activities that created us existed and didn't exist, like the light in the refrigerator after you closed the door.

On any given day, my mother might be in there, in dimness, riding out a migraine, the strong small pill dissolving underneath her tongue. "I have a bad head," she would have said at breakfast, her tone a mix of resignation and apology. The day's activities were canceled. If it was Saturday, that meant not going to the synagogue, and I could (oh glee! sitting so still, because if I was noisy I would ruin it) watch cartoons softly downstairs.

You could tell the nadir had passed when you heard Canadian Public Radio coming through the bedroom door. The perky theme from As It Happens meant the world was returning. There would be pot lids coming down, and drawers shutting, and doors opening. Dinner was going to be french toast, or maybe pizza and sodas in the tall, pale-blue, gold-flecked booths of the restaurant so far away (a ten-minute drive, I realized, returning to that suburb as a grown woman).

I interrupted her migrainous confinement only once, to tell her what I saw on television: President Nixon had resigned. The bed was a plain square shape in the light-dark of a curtained summer afternoon. There was a washcloth on my mother's forehead. She didn't say anything. Part of me was disappointed, but mostly I was filled with purpose and importance, as if I were an Information Minister with intelligence so vital I could walk into any bedroom in the neighborhood, without even knocking, to announce it.

An Overlooked Bedmaking Step

I have lately fallen under the spell of Cheryl Mendelson's book Home Comforts. She offers this advice under "Daily Care of the Bedroom," under the forgivably antic chapter title "The Cave of Nakedness:"

"Each day when you arise, air the bed. Open the windows, if possible; throw the bedcovers back over the foot of the bed. Let the bed stand this way, unmade, while you shower and eat breakfast. The bed should air for at least an hour if you are going to work, or even longer if you are staying home. This helps immensely toward keeping the bed feeling and smelling fresh until you next change the sheets."

The bed does feel better at night if you do this. And there is something wonderful about how the ritual reminds you of the end of the day, and the pleasures of going to sleep, even while you're flinging open the curtains amid the smell of burnt toast.

The Bedding Department at ABC

In the midst of Tropical Storm Mary, I hurried to Trader Joe's, near Union Square, to do a little stocking up. But as I was fighting my way to the Mighty Muffins and piling frozen things into my basket, I noticed the checkout line wound all the way around the store — twice. Clearly the sensible thing was toss the haricots back and walk to 19th and Broadway.

If you live in New York City, and you're reading this blog, probably you know that the third floor of ABC Carpet & Home is as thrilling as the textile exhibits at The Victoria and Albert Museum. Even if the sensible Sleeper buys most linens at Century 21, there's nothing like that place to erase the memory of a brawl over Two Buck Chuck or the I-live-in-Dumbo jackhammer jitters.

The soft and towering piles of linen, silk, cashmere. Anichini, Yves Dolorme (such bleedingly deep color), cottons from India, clean modern things, and even modestly priced Gaia organic sheets, all in a cathedral-like loft space. Maybe your Buddhist phase, like mine, has passed. Still, the sight of peach silk against grimy, rain-pelted loft windows makes you think renewal just might be possible. Your footfalls on the wood floors are muffled by the vast pillow department.

Of note yesterday: new sheets from textile designer John Robshaw, a former painter who once was Julian Schnabel's assistant. That is a $160 price tag on the brown-patterned queensize. That's what makes ABC ABC. That, and the $2800 Frette blanket that feels like very soft, light midmorning on heroin.
If you're drawn to sweet-ish patterns (I have been lately, against my will), you could visit Purl Patchwork, an excellent fabric shop on Sullivan Street, for a yard of Japanese fabric and have the dry cleaner make up something even more cunning, for cheap.

As a bonus, ABC's third floor also stocks the city's best selection of Abyss towels. I know of someone who threatened to take her ex to court over an orange bath sheet.