There was a stretch, roughly the first two years of this account existing, where striped throws got mentioned in nearly everything and mocked in the comments almost as often. Too nautical. Too “coastal cottage that isn’t near a coast.” Somebody would put one on a sofa in a photo and somebody else would take it straight back off before the shoot even finished. That was the house line for a while, quietly agreed on, never really argued.
It has shifted a lot since then, and not gradually either, more like everyone changed their mind within about six months of each other and pretended they’d always thought this. Now there’s at least one striped throw in nearly every communal space we’ve got between us, and the running joke is that whoever complained loudest in year one now owns three.
What actually happened, we think, is that people stopped buying the thin ones. The early stripe throws were basically a bedsheet with ambitions, lovely colours, no weight to them, gone limp and grey after four washes.
Once the acrylic knit versions turned up, the ones with actual heft, the whole category got taken seriously again.
One of ours has been dragged onto the garden step for about four years running and still looks like a throw rather than a rag, which nobody expected, least of all the person who bought it as a stopgap.
The stripe itself does something a plain throw doesn’t, which is hide everything.
Crumbs, dog hair, the toddler drawing on it in biro that one time, all of it just reads as pattern.
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A block colour throw shows every sin within a fortnight.
This one’s basically been forgiven for things a plain throw never would be.
Where the room genuinely splits now is width of stripe. Half want the fat, confident stripes, the sort that look like a deckchair had a baby with a jumper. The other half think anything wider than about four centimetres starts looking like a flag rather than a throw, and won’t be moved on it. Both camps own the wrong one from before they had this opinion, which nobody mentions out loud but everyone knows.
There’s also the folding argument, which never resolves.
Draped over the arm looks intentional for about a day and then slides onto the floor daily, no exceptions, we’ve tested this across at least six sofas. Folded on the ottoman stays put but looks like laundry. Nobody’s cracked it. We’ve just stopped trying and let it live wherever it lands, which is, annoyingly, the least stylish and most honest way to own one.
So the account line now is basically the opposite of where it started: buy the striped one, buy it heavy, expect to disagree about the width forever, and don’t bother folding it properly because none of us do either.
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