Plastic Slipcovers

Plastic Slipcovers.  If you are Italian or Italian-American (here-after referred to as Italian/IA) , or knew someone who was, and you were around in the 60’s and 70’s, then you know exactly what the words ‘plastic slipcovers’ signify.

And it does not have anything to do with a plastic covering for your car, bikes, grill, or anything outdoors that you might want to protect from the elements.

No, my friends.  It was needed for something that represented a far greater threat that occurred from within your house.

What threat could possibly exist within your home, for those of you who are uninitiated to the ways of the Italian/IA of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, might ask?

That threat was what every good Italian/IA housewife feared more than an overcooked rigatoni.

And that is, someone actually using the sofa or chair for their actual intended purpose, ie, sitting on them.

I think we need an intrepid cultural anthropologist to explore the origins of this practice of covering the sofas and chairs with plastic.

I would love to know how this trend got started.  Especially in an era where Tik-Tok didn’t exist.

Who was the signora who first came up with the idea that sofas and chairs should be covered in plastic? And why plastic vs cloth? And then how did that spread?  As I mentioned, this is the pre-social media era.

They certainly weren’t taking any cues from Arch Digest, or Better Homes and Garden.  Not even taking any cues from the First Lady herself who had redecorated the White House, with nary a plastic slip cover to be seen.  

But at some point, someone thought, hey let’s cover our sofas and chairs with plastic and then that idea took off like the plague.

Now mind you, like any hardworking immigrant, the Italians valued the things their hard-earned money was able to buy them.  And many, coming out of the depression, where thriftiness, and making things last, were things that were deeply ingrained.

So, when they were able to buy nice things they wanted to protect them and make them last.  They also wanted to be able to display some of that hard-earned middle-class wealth and so they wanted their nice things to not only last, but to look good. To others. To say, ‘I have arrived.’  A status symbol of sorts.

And thus was born the plastic slip cover.  I guess.  I am no cultural anthropologist.

I did, however, live this.  So I can speak from experience.

That experience?  HORRIBLE. 

First, there was the noise, that plastic crinkling noise every time you sat down or shifted in your seat.  Can someone please turn up the tv volume? I can’t hear what their saying over the noise of the plastic I am sitting on.

It was NOT COMFORTABLE at all.

In the summer time, when you were sweaty, your legs would stick to the plastic.  It almost felt like losing a layer of skin on the back of your legs when you went to stand up.

And did I mention how thrifty the Italians/IA were, because the air conditioning wasn’t put on unless the temperature reached 102.  If you even had air conditioning.  And those box window fans were useless.

In the winter time, in your pants you kind of slid around on the plastic covered cushions.

Now, with everything that we know about plastic contamination, I wonder how much BPA’s we were exposed to during those years.  We probably are walking vaults of microplastic.

In addition to covering the sofas and chairs in plastic, some went a step or a few steps further.

In our case, we had a small twin home.  There was no foyer.  The front door opened up right into the living room.

My mother put a plastic runner that ran from the front door, nearly the full length of the living room.  The bottom of that thing had sharp, pointy things that you did not want to accidentally walk on.

Some put the plastic over their lamp shades.  Dusting made easy!

I’ll tell you, you could really get creative with this.  It was the bedazzler before there was a bedazzler.  What can’t you cover with plastic?

And then, at some point, like whenever a fever has gripped a people, the Salem Witch trials for example, the fever disappears the way it arrived. Suddenly, one day out of the blue.

It took many, many years in this case though. 

In our house, I was in my teens before my mother returned to her senses and the plastic slip covers were no more.

I gotta tell you, though.  When the plastic slip cover came off, that sofa looked brand new.