Discover more from One Thing
Kyle Chayka: Sarah Espeute is a French designer living in Marseille who makes tablecloths, placemats, napkins, and other housewares hand-embroidered with meandering line drawings of the objects you might find on a well-laid table: plates, baguettes, roses, fish, lemon slices, half-emptied wine bottles and glasses. They beg you to throw a dinner party. I may have first encountered Espeute’s work, under the brand Œuvres Sensibles, on Instagram, where it succeeds wildly: the items are a perfect combination of crisply graphic, cottagecore twee, and millennial aspirational.
You know that type of Instagram account: You love the objects, or art, or clothes, and you click through to the site to do some digital window shopping. Then you wince at the price. Espeute’s immaculately provenanced tablecloths — made from vintage French fabric, on vintage machines — can run over $1,100. Worth it, I’m sure, but utterly irrelevant to my life at that cost. These are things you are meant to spill red wine onto.
Espeute’s work stuck in my mind long enough that I eventually just googled “embroidered tablecloths,” hoping to find a cheaper alternative. That’s how I came across the Etsy store FAVRTableware, which sells white linen tablecloths embroidered with the requisite olives, lemons, and baguettes for less than $200. Jess and I put one like this on our wedding registry, and a friend kindly bought it for us. It has been a perfect surface on which to host dinner parties: hefty, low-maintenance linen and bold, thick drawings in black thread. The embroidery might be done by computer (it’s a little too clean) but for $800 less, it’s a fine tradeoff.
Other options include HeedfulEmbroidery, GorilMarket, and Misette. It would be easy to call these ripoffs of Œuvres Sensibles, but I don’t think any artist has a monopoly on tablecloths decorated with foodstuffs and vessels. No more, at any rate, than Jackson Pollock had a monopoly on dripping paint on a canvas — he just did it better than anyone else. The styles and the subjects differ slightly but they are all fun. Isn’t the point of a tablecloth to not worry about it that much?
The concept of a dupe, popularized on TikTok and elsewhere, means a kind of authentic, worthwhile copy — it has value because of its derivative-ness. Not as authentic as the actual thing, but a good-enough replacement for the real luxury handbag or ultra-expensive skincare product. The dupe doesn’t throw shade on the original. It actually reifies the value of the original, building an eventual pathway to it. If money was no object then of course you’d buy the real thing, but for the time being you still want to participate in the aesthetic. Hunting down a good dupe might ultimately be a gesture of respect.
Subscribe to One Thing
A catalogue of authenticity
Thanks for a new vocabulary for me, “dupe”. I own a few vintage tribal rugs/kilims from Afghanistan/Iran that I fell in love with over the years.
Sadly you can’t get quality vintage rugs that aren’t collector price.
Good carpet merchants try to make hand-woven rugs using old patterns and plant-dyes these days. I guess these are “dupe” in a way, and if they serve to support the carpet industry, I’m all for it. (As long as they are honestly labelled as new carpets)