Why Did Duvets Replace Bedspreads?

Commentary

Yes, they are sometimes called “comforters.” A scene from the movie Fight Club has Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) asking the Narrator (played by Edward Norton) what a duvet is. The Narrator says that it’s a blanket. The duvet, then, in this movie, is a symbol of unnecessary luxury.

However, the Narrator is wrong. The duvet is not just a blanket. It is a new thing on our shores, and not a luxury at all but a deprecation.

In many households, bedspreads, the lighter versions of which are sometimes called coverlets, have been replaced by duvets (or comforters). So entrenched is this habit that a full generation has been raised to believe that this is the way we do things. Beds have a duvet topper and nothing else. That is the way beds are made.

Americans generally love goods with foreign names that are pronounced non-literally because it makes us feel fancy. This might be one reason they became so oddly popular but it is surely not the whole of it.

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To review, for hundreds of years prior, beds had what are called bedspreads, more recently dubbed coverlets. These are typically made of cotton. They cover the whole bed and flow down the sides. They are thin or thick and breathable.

Underneath them, one would typically put a wool blanket for winter months, followed by a cotton or linen sheet. All of this would be on top of the sleeper while the fitted sheet would be underneath. And that was how a bed was dressed.

Something odd happened after the turn of the millennium. Seemingly out of nowhere, these duvets gradually came to replace the bedspread. The duvet is a cotton or synthetic bag that holds down (the feathers of a foul) or synthetic material. It does not flow down the sides of the bed but typically sits on top.

In appearance, duvets are thick and puffy. They easily flop over the top of the bed in order to make the space look orderly. But by being filled with some material, again down or piled up synthetics that pretend to be down, they obviously trap body heat. They are not designed to breathe but rather to contain body heat within the bed itself. In that way, they are considered to be more efficient.

And yet, there is a downside. By not letting air escape, and instead reflecting body heat back down to the body, they roil and boil the person who is sleeping under them. It can become quite extreme, such that you wake up in the night hot as a furnace and have to throw off the duvet to get air. That exposes your sweaty body to the outside air which makes one cold, so you have to put the duvet back on.

Soon after you fall back asleep, the problem reappears as heat is again trapped in between the covers. Your body becomes bread in a toaster. This action of putting on and taking off the covers repeats again and again the entire night through until the sun mercifully rises and the arduous task of attempting to sleep with constantly fluctuating body temperature ends.

And this is how an entire generation has come to believe in the nature of sleep, all because we somehow made the decision to replace bedspreads of hundreds of years with new things called duvets, the origin of which is said to be French but one doesn’t entirely know for sure.

We truly truly wonder how and why this happened.

I have my own theories. One major problem simply comes down to the tyranny of fashion. There is a new thing, and so the Whig theory of history implants in our brains that somehow the new thing is surely better than the old. We live in a digital age so that surely has implications for our beddings. Everyone is doing it and that means I should do it too.

Americans in particular are suckers for this pitch. This is because the dominant part of our history as a nation has consisted of material progress, with some blips along the way. We’ve mostly taken for granted the slogan that if it is new, it is surely improved. It says so on the bottles and packages, and this has mostly been our experience.

As a result, we are culturally inclined to replace the tried and true for something else, even if we don’t know anything about it.

But, again, that is not the whole of it. The real core here—and this is just a theory—comes down to the lifetime exhortation from mom to make your bed. We’ve all been there. When we are kids, we hop out of bed and get dressed for school and leave the bed looking like a mess. Mom comes along and says that this simply will not do.

We have one major job as kids—apart from developing good table manners and getting good grades—and that is making the bed.

This has instilled generations of guilt when we fail. We want to make our beds but it takes time and energy just as the day dawns so that seems like too much. But when we failed in the past, we did hear about it. This has been going on for many generations but somehow we got by.

After the turn of the millennium, this new thing, seemingly from France and therefore legitimate, came along. It enticed millions to try it out.