The motel bedspread

Three generations of motel bedspread exist in the wild, distinguishable by print: the busy florals of the seventies, retained past their era because busy prints forgive more than plain ones; the diamond-quilted synthetics of the eighties, slick enough to slide a suitcase across without waking anyone; and the muted, hotel-adjacent stripe now favored by chains trying to look less like motels. Cataloged by touch as much as by sight, the fabric across all three generations shares a family resemblance: a slight stiffness, somewhere between canvas and something that used to be plush, achieved by a synthetic fiber blend chosen for its resistance to soil rather than its regard for skin. The quilting is not decorative so much as structural, breaking the surface into small diamonds so a stain, should one occur, has nowhere large to spread. Under a black light, these fabrics are said to reveal a history the eye is spared in ordinary lamplight. Above the pattern, in daylight, the bedspread does its actual work: absorbing dust, arresting drafts, and providing the one surface in the room a traveler will set a suitcase on without a second thought, sparing the mattress the indignity. It is laundered on an industrial cycle at a heat that would ruin a finer weave, and the pattern survives that too, unfaded, exactly as loud as the day it arrived. Grey by touch, riotous by sight: motel bedspreads reconcile the two rather than choosing.

Sig. Lundqvist