Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the linen sheets were from Merci. They are from Yves Delorme. After publishing this article on September 8, we heard back from the production designer, who told us that she misidentified the blue-gray sheets that are featured in Passages.
If the promise of hot actors engaging in a messy, would-be ménage à trois isn’t enough to entice you to go see Passages, the new film by Ira Sachs, maybe its beautiful bedding will. Culture features editor for New York magazine Madeline Leung Coleman first tipped us off: “Everyone who sees the movie, which is hands down the sexy adult movie of the season, comes out raving about the movie’s bed linens.” Makes sense, because “the film largely takes place in beds,” says Coleman. “There’s a blue set, in particular, that everyone is obsessed with.”
As someone who worked in the film industry in a past life (and is currently the Strategist’s de facto bedding expert), I had to see the sheets (and the movie) for myself. For context, Passages takes place in Paris and a country location just outside it, where Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw), a married couple, meet Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a schoolteacher. Tomas, a movie director, begins an affair with Agathe and eventually moves in with her, tearing up his marriage to Martin while insisting on maintaining a relationship with him. All this to say, it’s a bedroom drama, and so, naturally, the beds take center stage in key scenes in the film.
The sets are all exquisitely appointed, too, so I called up Passages’s production designer, Pascale Consigny, to find out exactly where the sheets in question came from. “The very nice French-linens house Yves Delorme lent us most of the beautiful sheets we used in the film, as we had no budget to buy any sheets,” she tells me from France. The blue sheets that Coleman mentioned are shown in Tomas and Martin’s country house and are the brand’s Originel style. They’re made in France of stonewashed organic linen.
They’re actually a pale greenish-blue (“ocean,” to be precise) and really quite striking. The color profile also seems to change from scene to scene, going from dark to light, depending on the time of day. (The film still, above, renders them a bit bluer than in the actual movie.) Conveniently, Yves Delorme is available in the U.S., so you can re-create the couple’s bedscape (but hopefully not their drama). You can buy each piece separately, depending on what you need.
Yves Delorme sheets also dress the bed in their Paris apartment. They’re the Flandre style, a white organic-cotton-percale sheet with colored piping detail. You can see them in what is the film’s longest sex scene. They’re paired with a gorgeous mohair blanket in a caramel color that Consigny found at a secondhand store. She doesn’t know what the brand is, but she thinks it could be from Brun de Vian-Tiran, a 200-year-old French manufacturer of natural blankets. For something a little more affordable, here’s one from Design Within Reach in a similar color.
Editor’s note: Brun de Vian-Tiran lists all prices in euros, so the price shown here is an approximate conversion to U.S. dollars.
Finally, at Agathe’s apartment, we see two different sets of bedding at two crucial moments in the film. The first, in a love scene between Agathe and Tomas, is a bold blue (also by Yves Delorme), but in a later scene, the bed is outfitted with sheets that are a bit more affordable and subdued. “I must confess that they are from Ikea,” says Consigny. They’re striped light-pink cotton sheets with a bit of texture that makes them look closer to linen. They also have a similar edging around the pillowcase as the linen set found at the country house if you want to go for that distinctly European look for less money.
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