Vindication

I bought a white bed and everyone laughed at me. Full commitment—white frame, white sheets, white pillows, the whole thing. Then V Magazine comes out with a shoot: Kate Upton, Miranda Kerr, Candice Swanepoel, Amber Valletta, all half-naked on white beds, shot by Sebastian Faena. Suddenly my taste in bedroom furniture doesn’t look stupid.

You don’t need much explanation for why it works. Beautiful woman on white sheets equals good photograph. The skin looks right, the light is clean, there’s nothing to distract from the body. Fashion photographers know this, which is why they keep returning to white bedding. I knew it too when I bought mine, even if I wasn’t putting it that way. You see enough magazine spreads on white sheets and you start understanding what that visual does.

The funny part is the vindication. A professional photographer with supermodels for a magazine made the same choice. White works. He used it for a shoot, I used it for a bedroom. The principle was identical.

I thought about printing out the Kate Upton photo and telling people it was shot in my bed, but that misses the point. The real thing is knowing something about what works visually, about how skin and light and white interact, and applying that knowledge to your own space. The bed was right. That’s it.