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 isn’t just a blanket. It’s 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In many households, bedspreads, the lighter versions of which are sometimes called coverlets, have been replaced by duvets (or comforters).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’s the way beds are made.
Americans generally love goods with foreign names that are pronounced nonliterally because they make us feel fancy. This might be one reason they became so oddly popular but it is surely not the whole of it.
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 a fitted sheet would be underneath. 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 doesn’t 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 aren’t 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 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. That’s 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 with 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, 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. As it turns out, a bed with a duvet rather than a bedspread can be made with nothing more than the move of one hand. We throw it on top. Nothing more. The look seems accommodating to the exhortation to make our bed. It covers up wrinkled sheets and blankets. It seems like we have done our jobs.
Our laziness is no longer punished. And we no longer have to face a judge in the same household who observes the post-sleep mess and points it out to us. Instead, the bed is “made” daily with nothing other than a flick of the wrist.
As a result of this one feature, and the legitimacy of a product seemingly from France, we avoid every manner of guilt, shame, approbation, and external judgment. This supposed duvet has apparently solved all issues associated with the inexorable American tendency to prefer convenience above all else.
There’s only one problem. The duvet provides a relatively miserable sleeping experience, which people who have never had their bed covered with a bedspread may or may not know. Perhaps an entire generation believes that sleeping consists of constantly waking up and throwing the duvet on or off.
I get that they are easier for hotels and easier for people in private life because it saves all of four to five minutes as compared to a bedspread. But truly, the whole trend strikes me as a terrible mistake. The market might be speaking but never forget that the market isn’t the standard of beauty, truth, or even functionality.
Sometimes, the dominant player is not the best.
The old-fashioned bedspread gained popularity in the Middle Ages among royalty and the most well-to-do merchants, even as the peasants slept on bean shells with animal pelts. As the Industrial Revolution gained steam, the people had access to woven cottons and linens. Average people could have comfortable beds and they prized them, adorning them with beautiful fabrics.
The idea of making one’s bed comes from that tradition: showing deep appreciation for the material blessings among us. We dare not turn our back on this grand tradition. The duvet is no replacement for the true-blue American bedspread. Do your part to restore what is right and true, and you will be rewarded for it.
