What's the deal with decorative pillows?
This post is dedicated to the ethnographer and brand consultant Peter Spear, who got me thinking about the topic of decorative pillows during our recent conversation on his ‘That Business of Meaning’ podcast.
I have a confession to make: I used to be a fan of decorative pillows. I distinctly remember when my husband cured me of the habit. I had purchased two rather expensive decorative pillows for our bed: one sequined and the other beaded. Neither pillow, it must be said, was remotely comfortable to lean on in bed. This was in part because they were only marginally larger than pin cushions, but also because sequins and beads are not exactly go-to comfort fabrics. Even my cat, Spike, who could be relied upon to immediately sit on every piece of clothing placed on the bed, thereby covering it in cat hair, eschewed them.
My husband was distinctly unimpressed with the cushions – not just their lack of functionality but the fact that they were an active hindrance to getting into bed. While his arguments were reasonably persuasive, the nail in the coffin – or the knife in the cushion, as it were – was the movie Along Came Polly, which we saw shortly after this conversation. Finally convinced, at that point I relinquished my decorative pillow obsession in much the same manner that I got over my dummy fixation as a three-year-old:1 by getting rid of them all at once.
But while it’s been twenty years since I abandoned decorative pillows, in the interior design world they remain a staple. So important are decorative pillows that you will find endless advice not only on how to arrange and style them, and which ones are currently trending, but whether they should be ‘chopped’ or ‘plumped’. And when it comes to the cost of decorative pillows, well, the sky’s the limit – you can drop $57,000 on one, if you so desire. So what are decorative pillows all about?
Now, before proceeding, I want to distinguish between ‘decorative pillows’ and their cousins: ‘throw cushions’ and ‘accent cushions’. These terms are often used interchangeably, but I don’t see them as the same thing. For the record, I think that throw cushions – if they are a decent size, made of a comfortable fabric, readily conform to the contours of the human body when you sit on them, and are not excessive in number – are highly functional.
Decorative pillows, in contrast, are those cushions that serve no purpose beyond an aesthetic one, being too small, overstuffed or uncomfortable (or generally some combination of the above) to actually use. My basic rule of thumb is that if you can’t smother someone with it (à la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), it’s a decorative pillow.2 Conversely, accent pillows can go either way – verging into either decorative pillows or throw cushions depending on their size and the materials they are made out of. This, I think, is where the early noughties British sitcom Coupling gets things somewhat wrong in the episode featuring ‘cushion rage’.
Where, of course, the show is right is that decorative pillows are gendered. That women are the largest consumers of them might be a stereotype, but it is also a reality. While gender norms around interior design have unquestionably loosened in recent years, decorative pillows seem to be one of those areas that still split along broadly gendered lines – at least, outside the world of professional interior design. Although plenty of women don’t see the point of decorative pillows, the numerous threads expounding on their evils (like this and this) are mostly written by men.
Notably, the occasional defenders of decorative pillows in these threads seem to focus primarily on their accidental functional uses as opposed to their intended decorative ones – such as their value in pillow fights, as foot rests, dog forts or sex aids.3 Even men declaring their love of decorative pillows seem to be operating mostly in satiric mode, such as Alex Watt’s ode in the New Yorker, where he writes,
‘Benjamin Franklin once said that “fatigue is the best pillow.” I say go fly a kite in a thunderstorm, Benny boy, because the best pillows are decorative. Write your little quilled quip in script, slap it on a small, scratchy pillow, and then get back to me. God knows I’ve been looking to add to my collection’.
Where men have become decorative pillow converts, this is often due to the influence of a partner, with one columnist going so far as to suggest that throw pillows reveal the state of a relationship, requiring (apparently like women themselves), ‘maintenance, care… and constant attention’. ‘The real way to tell how a man will treat you’, he advises readers, in possibly the worst relationship advice I have ever encountered, ‘is how he treats his throw pillows’.4
Certainly, it’s in the context of live-in relationships that many heterosexual men first encounter decorative pillows in the bedroom, largely because women remain primarily responsible for home decor purchasing decisions in countries like the USA and the UK. This, I suspect, is why diminutive pillows feature so frequently in online rants: decorative cushions might not reveal the state of a relationship, but they definitely operate as a symbol of it.5 As the anthropologist Mary Douglas observed, ‘Reflection on objects leads us back to persons’.
But decorative pillows are a very particular kind of object because they lack what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘handiness’. Using his now-famous example of the hammer, he explained:
The less we stare at the thing called hammer, the more we take hold of it and use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered for what it is, as a useful thing. The act of hammering itself discovers the specific ‘handiness’ of the hammer.
Sadly, Heidegger had nothing to say about decorative pillows, but I think we can safely assume that they reside at the opposite end of the ‘handiness’ spectrum.
Continuing in this vein, the sociologist Stephen Harold Riggins makes a distinction between the agency and mode of objects. Some objects, he observes, are intrinsically active – they are designed to be used. A hammer is one; a corkscrew is another. Other objects are intrinsically passive – they are designed to be contemplated, like paintings or decorative pillows. But it gets more complicated, because objects also have an active and passive mode. In their active mode, objects are touched, used and moved about the home, regardless of their intended use. Conversely, in their passive mode, they are contemplated irrespective of their original intention.
To illustrate, let’s say you collect hammers – in fact, you love them so much that you have dozens displayed on your living room wall. Despite what perturbed visitors are likely to think, your hammers are now in passive mode, regardless of their intended function. Alternatively, let’s say that you regularly use your decorative pillows – during sex, as footrests, laptop holders and so forth. Your pillows have entered active mode, even though they were designed primarily to be looked at.
Presumably, decorative pillows never enter active mode for most people; they remain intrinsically passive, with a purely visual function. But unlike paintings and sculptures, the decorative pillow is not an independent aesthetic object.6 Instead, it forms part of a larger scheme that includes other objects in the room: the hard furnishings as well as the soft ones.
To use the lexicon of semioticans (who, as I’ve previously discussed, never use a straightforward word when a complicated one will do), it forms part of a syntagm: its value comes from its position within a larger system. Therefore, if you change the system (i.e., the design scheme), the pillows change too. This is borne out by a US study of women’s attitudes towards home textiles, where the most common reason for changing decorative pillows was ‘coordinating with other furniture or decor’. Thus, the aesthetic value of the decorative pillow can’t be disentangled from this context.
The primary exception is those godawful decorative cushions emblazoned with heartfelt or ironic expressions.7 Of course, word art cushions are exceptional in other respects as well, arguably violating the maxim of the nineteenth-century British textile designer William Morris to ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’.
Still, even objectively attractive decorative cushions become distinctly less beautiful when covering virtually the entire surface of a bed or lounge. In fact, most decorative pillow lovers typically have a cushion limit, albeit one that’s markedly higher than that of the average person.8 For instance, I assume most of us, regardless of gender, would agree that the following bed surpasses the acceptable limit, unless we have a decorative pillow problem – something satirised in a Reductress article titled ‘No amount of decorative pillows will make you feel whole again’.
In the end, I guess the point is that decorative cushions, like most of the objects in our lives, are never just cushions. In fact, when you think about it, they are not really cushions at all – their capacity to actually cushion the body being their least reliable attribute. Basically, think of them as a mini-artwork, albeit one that plummets in value as soon as you leave the store, the market for objects that have to be treated for potential bed bugs or semen stains being predictably low. Or better yet, consider them as an art installation, purchased exclusively because they match your carpet and drapes.9 And if you have to throw them off the bed every time you want to actually use it? Well, that, my friend, is the price of beauty.
Until the age of three, I was completely fixated with dummies (a.k.a. ‘pacifiers’ for the North Americans amongst you). In fact, I would continue to wear my favourites long after the actual dummy had rotted away. My parents apparently despaired of ever ridding me of the habit, until one day a conversation about me now being too old for dummies finally sank in. According to family lore, I buried them in the incinerator that very day and never went near them again. As with dummies, so too with decorative pillows.
Random fact: one of the top ten contenders for the creepiest academic studies published in the past five years is surely a paper titled ‘Lethal smothering with a pillow – How 181 music festival visitors tried to kill a dummy’. Exactly what it sounds like, the researchers asked 181 visitors at a Dutch music festival to smother a dummy with a pillow to determine how lethal their technique was. Interestingly, as the pictures from the article attest, their smother-pillows of choice were the size of throw cushions.
I’m not sure I particularly wanted to know this* but sex pillows are, apparently, a thing, although I’m still stumped on why you would want to rate them on qualities such as their ‘versatile, moisture-resistant liner’. What on earth are people doing with the liner?!?
*Especially because I’m now at the age where my brain is full and for every new piece of information that goes in, something has to go out. I’m reasonably confident that whatever bit of trivia I lost in the process of researching this piece was more important than the existence of sex pillows.
My husband has been known to punch throw pillows to get them into shape, he regularly steals them all when we are watching telly on the couch, and occasionally puts his feet on them, which, according to this bit of relationship wisdom, must make him an abusive polygynist.
In this respect, decorative cushions are basically the symbolic equivalent of toilet seats, which are equally prone to online debates that are poorly disguised proxies for ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’-style gripes about relationships.
Unless – horrors! – you have chosen these objects to fit your decor, something treated as irredeemably bourgeois by high-art types.
Like those ‘We had sex here’ cushions, which seem slightly amusing, until, that is, you realise that you’re going to have to actually sit on the couch or sleep in the bed they are displayed on.
I speak here as a former decorative pillow lover myself. Before I saw in the error in my ways, I definitely passed saturation point on the lounge, which included functional throw cushions and an excessive number of purely decorative ones. Part of the problem is that when you’re into decorative pillows, people frequently give them to you as gifts, thus enabling your habit. Still, my decorative pillow phase was not as bad as my cupid phase in my teens. Even after I was heartily sick of cupids,* I continued to receive cupid pictures, cupid sculptures, cupid scarves, cupid jewellery and even a cupid watch from well-meaning friends.
*The real question is why on earth I was into them in the first place.
Er, the ones in your room, obviously, not the ones on your body, although who can say for sex pillows.