One thing led to another, as it often does, and over the course of the pandemic, craving comfort and falling under the sway of pillow influencers, Dara Cheek found herself becoming someone who not only used the word “bedscape” but whose bed hosted one, two, and then all of a sudden seven decorative pillows.
The Watertown artist was thus thrust into a routine that involved the removal and storage of the pillows each night, in a specially purchased woven basket, and then, come morning, with an engineer’s precision, the replacement of the pillows: the oversized square pillow in the back, two round ones on either side, three small rectangular pillows stacked in front, a small square pillow in front of them, and, unseen, in the back, under the comforter, another four pillows, two body pillows and, finally, two just for sleeping.
Cheek, 41, lives alone with her cats and her plants, and when she’s tired, she confessed, she shirks pillow duty. “Sometimes I can’t face it,” she said.
Was Sisyphus himself so burdened?
People who follow home design trends, or even those who’ve seen a real estate listing for a property that’s been professionally staged, know that for the past few decades we’ve been living in what scientists might call the pillocene era — an epoch during which no bed is considered “dressed” unless the pillows are so numerous they obscure that mattress itself.
But then, in September, in a dictate that threatens bedscapes from the Cape to the Berkshires and beyond, the influential Architectural Digest pronounced that “monastic” and “minimalist” beds are in. “Gone,” the magazine declared, “are the piles of decorative pillows. . . .”
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Alas, word has yet to filter down to the masses, and so the tension with our ornamental overlords continues. To someone not involved in a pillow power struggle, or battling personal pillow demons, they seem so benign — inconsequential even.
But in pillow circles, if you create a safe space for people to speak freely, you’ll hear about marital strife, free-floating pillow rage, even death.
“We reached an age when throwing them on the floor randomly is a problem” — you could trip, said Vicki Donlan, 72, of Hingham. “Hit your head and you’re dead.”
“My ex-husband, emphasis on the word ‘ex,’ used to hate them,” said a local business owner who asked for anonymity. When a recent date skeptically asked why she needed so many, that was it. “I had a glimpse of more smirking criticism coming,” she said.
On Reddit, a thread about bed pillows — in which one friend criticized another for having too many — turned ugly, shockingly so, given the subject matter.
“It’s your bed,” a user responded. “if you want lots of pillows then middle finger to the world my friend.”
The middle finger. Over a pillow.
Bed-pillow hostility played a role in the 2004 Ben Stiller–Jennifer Aniston romcom “Along Came Polly” (a knife is involved), and comedian Jim Gaffigan went on the attack, too.
“Has anyone ever been impressed by pillows?” he snarls in a stand-up bit. “Like someone’s going to leave your bedroom [and say], ‘I didn’t know they were doing that well. They got like 40, 50 pillows on that bed. They’re rolling in down.’ ”
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Architectural Digest’s prediction notwithstanding, the pillows are still in charge. The global decorative pillow market is predicted to reach $4.8 billion by 2028, up from $3.4 billion in 2022, according to Business Research Insights. Many hotels layer the pillows so deep you need that second bed so you have somewhere to sleep. Online you can find “cheat sheets” for pillow layout formation.
The question of where to put the pillows at night had become so urgent that in 2022 Apartment Therapy wrote a whole story on it, and on Wayfair, you can spend hundreds of dollars for a “pillow fixture” — in civilian terms that’s a rack that holds pillows.
But it wasn’t always thus.
“When I was growing up, you had two pillows,” said Lauren Batemen, 40, a music teacher from Lynn, “and that’s what you got.”
Now she lives with a wife who loves decorating — and a flock of pillows that migrate from the bed to the couch and back again, or are swapped out for entirely new stock.
When Bateman was asked by a reporter to describe the collection — “Are they Euros, squares, boudoirs, bolsters, lumbers, rounds?” — she sounded panicky. “You’re asking the wrong person.”
Where did it all begin? At the Globe’s request, Hannah Martin, a senior design editor at Architectural Digest and author of the article on monastic bed making, traced the trend back to pillow zero.
“It’s a look you see often in the highly decorative interiors of someone like Mario Buatta,” she said, referring to the late, influential decorator, known as the “Prince of Chintz.”
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“From looking at archival bedroom images, it appears to have become a popular trend in the ‘70s and ‘80s and carried on. I’m thinking about Gloria Vanderbilt’s fab, quilt-covered New York bedroom from the ‘70s that features a pile of quilted cushions.”
Data on the breakdown of pillow preference by gender is scarce, but designers and people in the pillow trenches report that the trend skews female.
Such is the case in Milton, where Larry Lawfer, 73, a real estate agent, finds himself living with so many of his wife’s decorative pillows that he’s lost count. He first put the number at 54, but after “sneaking” into the bedroom he revised it to 18.
Once, when he was sick, he made the mistake of taking the pillows off the bed so he could rest during the day, and has since been prohibited from touching them.
“I will never,” said the man who’s been married 35 years, “go to bed before my wife again.”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.