Gingham invasion
On the insidious underbelly of nostalgia, Felicity, guest room fantasies, and skepticism of my own desires.
In my post earlier this week, I found myself articulating a fantasy that I hadn’t previously verbalized—that of a colorful, eclectic, cottagecore-influenced guest bedroom in our new house. The vision for the guest room involves a black wrought iron bed, a bright quilt in a modern pattern (the kind you would find in a wealthy New Yorker’s country house in the Hudson Valley, not an actual house in the country), layers of mixed-and-matched textiles, contemporary lamps on the nightstands, and plenty of hygge.1 In this fantasy, the guest room features the perfect ratio of antique and new items, rather than the random assemblage of hand-me-downs and Wayfair our guest room is actually likely to contain for the next five years. It conjures nostalgia for a grandparent’s house, but the mattress is new and the pillows are from Casper. Stacked on the antique nightstands are books that your host (me) has lovingly picked out just for you. It’s the kind of guest room where guests would happily retreat in the middle of a winter afternoon with a mug of tea to read a book on top of the quilt, but under the duvet. It doesn’t take a Psy. D. to recognize that this is exactly the type of guest room I would love to stay in as a guest.
While the algorithm had been helping me fine-tune this design aesthetic over on Pinterest for the last few months (reinforcing my desires by feeding me more images of beds layered with colorful mixed-and-matched textiles), I hadn’t noticed the extent to which my aesthetic fancies for the guest room had come to be dominated by colorful ginghams and checks until I realized their ubiquity in Pinterest’s suggestions for me:
Where is all of this gingham coming from?? And why am I so drawn to it?! Full disclosure, my Evanston Pinterest board is not the only realm of my life to have been infiltrated by gingham. I introduced a lot of gingham into my wardrobe in 2024. An unprecedented amount of gingham. Do I even like gingham? I think so! Do I just like it because it’s trendy?! Assuming yes, what about this gingham trend is appealing to me, and where is this trend even coming from?
To understand the cultural meaning of gingham, it is of course necessary to look back at the pattern’s historical origins. My earliest gingham associations are Dorothy’s blue-checked pinafore and the red-checkered tablecloths of a classic Italian restaurant. Until recently, I most often associated gingham with the starched navy and blue checkered Brooks Brothers shirts worn by finance bros, or That J. Crew Gingham Shirt worn by every guy I knew in the 2010s.
The history of gingham available online is unsatisfying. Even the origins of the word are uncertain. The OED defines gingham as a “type of cotton fabric typically having a checked pattern woven from contrasting white and coloured yarns,” or “a pattern or fabric of this kind.” The OED notes that in its earliest usage, “gingham” could also refer to a cotton fabric with a striped pattern; some scholars hypothesize that “gingham” came from the Malay word for striped, genggang, and that the word as well as the fabric made its way to England via the Dutch. But use of the Spanish word guingao in 1485 to refer to the “inexpensive cloth used chiefly for the outer layer of bed bags (now guinga gingham), predating Vasco da Gama's voyage, makes an origin in Malay very unlikely.”2 Hmm. In any event, it wasn’t until the 1800s that textile factories in Manchester, England began manufacturing the iconic checked pattern that we know as gingham today. (It’s still unclear to me what this modern gingham had in common with its predecessors.)
But if you know that gingham is known as “Vichy check” in France (which I did not, until I went down this rabbithole), a door into textile history opens up. Blue and white checked linens can be found in 14th century European illuminated manuscripts, and 11th century Viking blue and white checked textile fabrics have been found.3 In the 18th century, American colonists imported the Vichy check from Europe a century before it was being manufactured in Manchester mills. Gingham was prized by early Americans for perhaps many of the same reasons that it is popular today—because it was a “common, everyday fabric . . . simple . . . to weave and . . . easily laundered, so it was a utilitarian fabric that both the wealthy and poor like used in the 18th century to add some color to dull interiors. . .”4 Reading this, I realized that I have actually been coveting gingham bed linens since I was five years old . . . and wanted my colonial American Girl doll Felicity’s signature red-checkered canopy bed.
But Felicity alone can’t explain my, and our, current cultural obsession with gingham. As I write this, a very warm dark green gingham winter coat by The Very Warm (a rental via Nuuly) sits on the back of my chair. I’m wearing red and black gingham J. Crew socks from 2019 (though maybe the black makes them a check rather than a gingham). A person with two tone hair runs past the coffeeshop window wearing large windowpane green gingham sweatpants.
The earliest example of gingham infiltrating my current aesthetic was a black and white-checked sleeveless sundress (similar here) I bought from a local boutique shortly before my wedding in the summer of 2022. The silhouette was similar to a Hill House Nap Dress—ruched bodice, tiered skirt—but with a flounce that rendered it distinct from a Nap Dress. I wore it to our picnic brunch the day after our wedding with day-old wedding hair, I wore it on our honeymoon, and I wore it well into pregnancy. I loved it, but had no idea it would be my gingham gateway drug.
Fast forward two years and I am waiting to board a flight to Heathrow in Aberdeen. It’s the morning after our friends’ wedding in the Scottish Highlands. I am sick, traveling with a baby, and worse for the wear. We’re lining up to board first with the other families, and in front of us are two English couples, with five children under five between them. The families exude wealth in a carefully-coded understated English way—no large watches or showy designer handbags, but I can nevertheless immediately tell that they are carrying all of the right bags, and the children are wearing all of the right knits. It’s British, Barbour coat wealth, but self-conscious enough to place them below the aristocracy—probably upper-middle-class Londoners. The women are plain but slim, and I find them enviably chic. The one that sticks out in my memory is wearing a billowy lavender gingham maxi dress, an off-white wool cardigan, and white sneakers.
I have been trying to recreate this look—which could have been straight out of Cobble Hill—ever since. What did it symbolize for me?? Probably exactly the scene I witnessed—a pastoral weekend in the country, beautiful children in wool sweaters wading into a stream in Wellies, Pimms cups, croquet, probably very boring chatter. It was the sort of outfit you might find an attractive mother wearing on the ferry to Nantucket, a giant monogrammed boat tote on her arm. An attempt to dressdown one’s wealth, to be “casual,” just as my elegant grandma used to don a crisp white button-down shirt and her “dungarees” when she wanted to be casual—sophistication impossible to hide. But looking back, I see now that there was a girlishness to this outfit, in the practical pairing of sneakers with a dress, and the presence of gingham itself—the fabric of school uniforms for girls in the UK. It was exactly the sort of outfit this mother might have dressed her own daughter in. And while this woman surely owns a Barbour jacket, she wasn’t wearing a Barbour jacket. This outfit was actually much trendier—the lavender! The white sneakers!
Unfortunately, I got home from the UK to find that my own gingham dress from 2022 did not fit my postpartum body—at least not flatteringly. I frantically searched for lavender gingham maxi dresses, but couldn’t find something for less than $200, and didn’t want to splurge on a dress that might not fit me beyond that season. Readers, I’m ashamed to say I followed the trail of Amazon sponsored ads. Search for gingham dresses enough times, and Amazon will start spewing your recommendations from no-name brands like AERI and LOVEER, who are manufacturing dresses in a city in China I’ve never heard of. I shudder to think about the labor and the supply chain issues that went into manufacturing the … navy gingham nap dress, the beige gingham house dress, and black and white gingham drawstring pants that I ended up buying. But in my defense, these items were stables of my wardrobe this summer well into the fall, and even made an appearance in our professional family photoshoot this summer.
It seems remarkable that I’m now considering purchasing more gingham, this time for my house. It seems gingham is suddenly everywhere, albeit in colors we don’t typically associate with gingham. Is this a form of nostalgia that harkens our society’s conservative turn? Could it have predicted the election of Trump? This might sound crazy, but I know I’m not alone in associating gingham with some idyllic pastoral country fantasy. The recent explosion of gingham has to be viewed in the context of the idyllic pastoral fantasies being played out by “tradwife” influencers on the Internet—having lots of children, thanking God for traditional gender roles, deferring to one’s husband, living off the grid, and whipping up pancakes with heirloom grains while wearing a gingham apron.
These are chaotic, scary times, and it makes sense that we are turning inward, wanting to make our homes a bastion of coziness. Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing? Wanting to give my daughter a home that feels safe and warm? Wanting her to know a home that contains elements that connect her to my grandparents and my own childhood, even when the future is uncertain?
is the world’s foremost scholar on tradwife influencers and author of Momfluenced and . She recently wrote a piece for Bustle examining the allure of the tradwife aesthetic for Gen Z women and its potential conservative implications. Like Petersen, I don’t think we can view the tradwife influencer in a vacuum. When fed a romanticized vision of blissful soft-lit domesticity on social media, some young women may be intrigued by the possibility of sidestepping girlboss feminism altogether and opting out of the horrors of working motherhood…with political implications. (If I’d grown up doing active shooter drills at school, maybe I too would feel more of a pull to homeschool my children on a farm somewhere in Wyoming.) In highlighting the beauty of motherhood (which I do think we need to show!), the tradwife aesthetic airbrushes over the real mess of being a mother—the reality of being vomited on by your kid four times over the course of two days, trying to get amoxicillin into their mouth, and collapsing on the couch after cleaning up their strewn toys every night.This is all to say that I’m trying to be a bit more skeptical of my attraction to gingham. I’d like to say that my preference for gingham in bright, modern colors signifies an attempt to co-opt gingham from its tradition originals and tradwifey allusions. But in fantasizing about design aesthetics for my new house, I’m actively engaged in a performance of domesticity, no matter how modern my aesthetic preferences lean. I’m trapped in this performance, and I’m not really sure who the audience is. Our guests are here to see us (well, most often they are here to see my daughter), and while they may care about getting a good night’s sleep, the color palette of the guest room is not going to impact our relationships. For now, our guests will make do with my 2012 yellow and white striped duvet cover—my first proud purchase from West Elm when I got my first apartment in New York—and I’ll wait to see how I feel about gingham six months from now.
But as a parting gift, here is some gingham at a few different price points:
I also love the Society of Wanderers Check ruffle sheet in Biscuit and the Floss Check (not technically ginghams). I love the mix and match!
The Farrow & Ballness of it all! How rich and cozy is this?? If it screams “expensive,” that’s because it is!
Hygge is an untranslatable Danish word that refers to feelings of coziness and contentment. Curling up next to the fireplace with a book and a new pair of wool socks is hygge. Hygge has wormed itself into the American marketplace and been used by corporations to convince Americans to buy candles and throw blankets and, apparently, shower curtains. See “What is Hygge?” in Country Living.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “gingham (n. & adj.), Etymology,” September 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8656479063.
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