Luxury underfoot
As published in Material Intelligence, June 17, 2023
It’s difficult to imagine a group of Gilded Age women reading a magazine, or listening to music on a phonograph, while reclining on a rug. Their foundation garments wouldn’t have permitted it. The wool wouldn’t have been comfortable to laze on, even if it had been acceptably ladylike to do so. But this is exactly the posture in which we find women in the 1950s, at least in innumerable editorials and print ads. They lie sideways, wearing pants or leotards, doing their thing, almost as though there were a new, secret room in the house hovering just below the horizon line of the coffee table.
Nylon made it possible. Resilient, plush, colorful, stainresistant and stylish, this novel material helped domesticate a new zone in the great American interior: the floor. Children had always played down there, but that grown women would take to the floor, and get comfortable, was a new and provocative phenomenon in domestic life. A nylon carpet could turn a staid living room into an almost avant garde space. The plane ordinarily devoted to vacuum cleaners, and the searching eyes of critical houseguests, was now a place to spend time. The room was familiar, but the elevation was new.
In her 2012 study “Curtains and the Soft Architecture of the American Postwar Domestic Environment,” scholar Margaret Maile Petty describes the steely formalism that characterized American Modernism in the immediate postwar years, and its (literally) no-frills rejection of textiles. Though they didn’t have it in for carpet specifically, George Nelson and Henry Wright wrote in their 1945 book Tomorrow’s House: How to Plan Your Postwar Home Now that “shades, curtains, and draperies” should be banished as outmoded “clutter.” Whatever formal splendor the Nelson worldview brought into existence, though, few people can live, relax, or entertain without the creature comforts of soft furnishings.
No one was happier to ignore the scolds than the executives at DuPont. The company introduced a carpet product called Splendante in 1948, describing it as “luxurious,” and noting that its contrasting pile height gave it a sophisticated “bas-relief effect.” DuPont carpeting entered its plush era in 1959 when the company introduced (bulk continuous filament), which streamlined the manufacturing process and made carpeting even more affordable. By the time the company introduced its Antron brand in 1965, it was firmly established as an industry leader.
The printed advertising campaign for Antron comprises a rich fabric in its own right. This nylon carpet could be by turns modern and traditional—even stuffy—but it was always soft, and was typically portrayed as a comfortable surface for the whole body, not just the feet. The people we see in Antron’s advertising landscape are nearly all female. A 1967 print ad for Antron, which shows a mother and daughter playing on an immaculate pale green carpeted floor, invites readers to consider “underfoot luxury that lasts.” The promise of high-tech durability paired with stylish elegance appears in a similar DuPont print ad, this one for carpets made from the company’s 501 fiber, from 1966. A woman in a green dress presses her stockinged feet and bare hands across the blue carpet’s fibers. As in nylon hosiery ads from this period, she’s partially disembodied. Mostly what we can ascertain is her sensual pleasure; we can see that the carpet is soft, but we’re assured that it’s also “tough.”
To feel at home on the floor is, if period advertisements are any guide, to be unworried in a larger sense. A 1968 print ad for Bigelow carpet (manufactured by Monsanto) features a woman in a harlequin leotard—she has just returned from an outing with fellow costumed revelers—who lounges on the floor of her apartment with a cat, who may be a proxy for the single life. An appealingly minimalist ad for Magee carpet, likely from the late 1950s, shows a woman perched on a carpeted floor between two chairs: one traditional (Rococo revival) and one modern (an Eames Chair). She can decide to go either direction with her new carpet, though her position on the floor makes one wonder if she even needs furniture.
It probably seems odd to think of a midcentury industrial giant like DuPont as being countercultural. But nylon’s tactility was a factor in shifting the ideal of the American interior—and women’s bodies—from photo-ready, stilled perfection, to active, idiosyncratic movement and leisurely sprawl. A curious and probably unintentional result of nylon’s success was a rebuke of modernism’s “anti-softness” bias, which could be read as a desire to erase elements historically coded as feminine. The race to soften the postwar interior arguably paved the way for more aesthetically ambitious textiles, including the deep shag rugs so common in 1960s and 1970 interiors. The seeds were planted by DuPont’s chemists at midcentury; soon, enthusiasm for fibers would be in full bloom.