Sister Parish’s aunt-in-law spent much of the 1940s and 50s gnashing her teeth. In the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit America, her nephew’s wife had disgraced her class, sex and good name by starting an interiors business to earn money and – worse, by God, worse – had dared to put that same name on a sign to advertise that business.
The aunt had promptly crossed her nephew’s name off her will in favour of her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt. The gnashing began when a veritable roll-call of the great, the good and the stylish (Astor, Paley, Getty, Rockefeller, Whitney) began flocking to the humble premises of ‘Mrs Henry Parish II, Interiors’ in Far Hills, New Jersey, to beg her to decorate for them. Soon her unselfconscious, unstudied style, which included colourful floors, good antiques, white wicker, botanical prints and lashings of ticking stripe, was in all the best homes in the country, up to and including the White House. The aunt was left feeling rather foolish.
In the history of the ticking stripe, facts are thin on the ground. We know that, traditionally, ticking was a humble, hard-wearing fabric, created using a dense herringbone weave, usually striped in muted red or blue. Sometimes there was a central thicker stripe flanked by two thinner ones; sometimes the stripes were thin and even.
‘Ticking’ is derived from the Latin tēca or thēca, meaning ‘case’ or ‘covering’, and it arrived in English via Middle Low German and Middle Dutch around the 15th century. This etymological journey makes sense: the cloth’s principal use was for covering pillows and mattresses in the days when ‘mattress’ meant a bag stuffed with whatever softish stuff came to hand, such as horsehair, straw or feathers. A thick, densely woven cloth was necessary to prevent tough bits of filling poking the sleeper or making holes big enough to let the stuffing leak out.
It’s not hard to see why Sister Parish (her real name was actually Dorothy, but her younger brother’s nickname for her stuck) loved ticking. Unpretentious, versatile and a great foil for both plains and more daring prints, it can be made in almost any colour and slipped into any interior to lend a touch of timeless informality.
Small wonder that it has remained a favourite of designers for over a century (ignore anyone telling you it is ‘making a comeback’; it never left). Classicists on the hunt for their perfect ticking might want to start with Ian Mankin, a firm that has been producing the fabric since the early 1980s and offers a wealth of options, but one of the many joys of ticking is that it can be procured in any number of iterations, colourways and price-points. It’s the epitome of democratically available good taste – and a thumb in the eye for snobbish aunts everywhere.
