Towel swaddles you in comfort
Today is Yom Kippur, a holy day on the ancient Jewish calendar that many Jews spend fasting and in prayer, atoning for their transgressions. In essence it’s a day of spiritual cleansing, if you will, for the fresh new year to come, which is why I thought it might be oddly appropriate to write about a bath towel.
And not just any old bath towel, but the 802-gram Turkish towel from Restoration Hardware, which I happen to think offers pretty much the best towel experience for your money. Plus, these babies happen to be on sale now $24 (U.S.) for the 30inch by 56 inch bath towel. I wouldn’t bother with the 40 inch by 70 inch bath sheet, as it’s simply de trop. It’s a good moment if you feel inclined to up your bath linens game.
Loomed from a decadent 802 grams of what the folks at Restoration call “premium, long-staple cotton” to an extra-dense weave that’s both super soft and madly absorbent, it’s basically the Platonic ideal of a towel: something to swaddle yourself in after bathing that’s almost reassuring, it’s so damn comfortable. This is why I even go to the bother of ordering them online now that Restoration Hardware calls itself “RH” and stopped actually carrying any merchandise in their “stores,” which is annoying.
Seriously, you can’t just go into an RH now to buy anything. All you’ll find there are sales associates with little iPads who will order whatever it is you might have come in looking for by typing in all the info from the catalogue themselves online, while you sit there, bored, playing on your phone, wondering why RH bothers having any of these so-called stores.
And this is how I ended up accidentally ordering dozens of these 802 gram Turkish towels online myself the other day. All white, of course, as bathroom towels should be (coloured towels for the beach or the pool is my rule, but indoor towelling really is so much nicer all in white), but in significantly larger quantities than I had planned.
I don’t know exactly how it happened, perhaps I was distracted by a phone call or a surprise visitor while I was in the midst of ordering my 802 gram towels, but somehow my little order of six mushroomed into absurdist territory, and before I knew it, I had two enormous cardboard boxes dropped by UPS on my front porch with stacks of white towels inside. So many towels that it would not be cost effective to ship them back to RH to get my money back. Given that these particular towels are the gift that keeps on giving, this is not a tragedy. But it does remind me why I really prefer going into a store even to replenish a known commodity such as a favourite bath towel. As there is absolutely no way I could have made it to my car from the RH “store” carrying all those towels. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Her new book, What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss, is published by the House of Anansi Press. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.