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.
