Pillow Talk

What are we really looking for when we lay our heads to rest? Alice Gregory goes in search of a good night's sleep, starting from the top. Painting by Noelia Towers.

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IN A BIND Pillows tend to be either the most cherished part of one's bed or to blame for sleep's delay.

Last year, a few days after Thanksgiving, when the temperatures finally dropped low enough in New York City to warrant unpacking my full-body pillow of a winter coat, I was crestfallen to discover closet moths had eaten through it so thoroughly as to preclude donation even to the local cat café. I stuffed the thing in a municipal garbage can on the street corner and, rather than replacing it, spent the next few weeks fine-tuning an elaborate layering system of lesser garments, sublimating the loss in an oddly literal way: I became obsessed with pillows.

On the runway, Simone Rocha sent models clutching ruffled pillows like amulets, as though our most private of bedroom objects were in fact fit for public display, while Guram Gvasalia's spring 2026 vision at Vetements was colder, with polished leather pillows affixed, like riot gear, to the torsos of incognito women. But I didn't want to accessorize with conceptual pillows—I wanted the real thing: pillows themselves, more of them and better ones than those I already had. In a year that felt particularly loud and unyielding, the desire felt like an honest admission of fatigue.

Pillows are, in their own quiet way, polarizing. They tend to be either the most cherished part of one's bed or to blame for sleep's delay. For years, my husband has been complaining about what he calls “our pillow situation.” Until recently, it consisted of somewhere between six and eight cushions of various vintages and price points. Every so often, he'd groan about them and I'd make a halfhearted attempt to fix the state of affairs by ordering a new one from Ikea or Amazon for roughly 10 dollars more than we had paid for the previous in hope that a marginal upgrade might have results disproportionate to the investment, but it never did.