People have never been more obsessed with sleep — cycling, scheduling, hacking and tracking it. The longevity industry has mined the clinical side of sleep through supplements and wearables. But for some of the sleep-obsessed, no amount of magnesium glycinate can offset the psychic effect of a set of ugly sheets.
When Laura Tanzer and her wife, Jessica Simpson, were furnishing their first home a couple of years ago, the bedding options seemed stagnant and stifling, a sea of white sets with contrast borders.
“We were like, ‘Why isn’t it playful?’” Simpson said. “We want color, we want texture, we want personality. We don’t want the pillowcases to match. Ever.” They also wanted the highest quality.
In 2024, Tanzer and Simpson introduced Millaux, a bedding line that treats the bed as a vessel of personal expression and luxury akin to haute couture fashion — in some ways.
“We came up with this idea of bed clothes, like dressing your bed,” said Simpson, a former professional tennis player from South Africa. The Millaux (pronounced me-low) collections harness fashion’s tenets of mutable creative communication through vivid color and patterns — lime green and baby blue, leopard — that defy the reserved standards of Frette, Pratesi and D. Porthault.
Instead of operating within the traditional decorative confines of tasteful ticking and dainty florals, Millaux’s products bear the full fashion design process. Tanzer knows it well. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in London, she was hired by Demna, working as his creative assistant at Balenciaga from 2020 to 2023. She assisted on the house’s ready-to-wear, accessory and couture collections as well as campaigns and brand image.
“It was the best education,” said Tanzer, a soft-spoken Swiss woman who lit up at the mention of couture. “The French atelier with everyone wearing white robes. It really gives you a different sense of time and consumerism.” She could have created a fashion line, but bedding offered an appealing slowness and eccentricity.
“You’re not just going to mass-produce it and have the pressure of selling 500 units,” she said.
Millaux is the bedding of Tanzer and Simpson’s memories, dreams, reflections and fantasies. Carl Jung would approve. The first two collections established the line’s aesthetic duality. The Pastoral collection mined the off-kilter side of rustic with flax linen pieces in pastel mint or pink with cream awning-style stripes. Royale explored the couple’s fixation on medieval splendor with the distinctive Magpie duvet covers and pillow cases, crafted from four color-blocked triangles (blue and red; tonal acid greens) that resemble ancient flags.
Millaux’s third collection, Park, to be released on May 18, bridges nostalgia and city sophistication. Last year Tanzer and Simpson moved from Zurich to New York City, where they have full-time day jobs: Simpson as a brand consultant, Tanzer as collections director at the Tremaine Emory label Denim Tears. They envision Park’s abstract Dalmatian print, inspired by Simpson’s childhood dog, and the Magpie series, rendered in combinations of black, ivory and gray, in a Manhattan loft.
“It looks like something Mae West would have slept on,” said Peter Copping, the artistic director of Lanvin, who met Tanzer while working on Balenciaga’s couture collections. “It’s hard to do something original these days that’s not referencing something else.”
Copping and Tanzer bonded over their interest in interiors. In addition to his fashion work, he designs a small collection of homewares called La Carlière, named after his 16th-century country house in Normandy. Tanzer and Simpson shot the imagery for Park at Château d’Autricourt, a private 12th-century castle with a moat in France.
Millaux seeks to evoke a vibrant and surprising world, where a messy bed can be beautiful, a leopard-print duvet cover can be tasteful and pillows trimmed in flaglike triangles can be deployed like earrings accenting an outfit. Fiona Blakeman, a textile designer in London who has worked with Phoebe Philo, Grace Wales Bonner and Jonathan Anderson, develops prints for Millaux. Its gothic branding is by Simpson’s sister, Roxanne Simpson. The sachet that accompanies each piece of bed linen was created by Simpson’s aunt, Karen Simpson Blomerus.
“They gave me a lot of descriptors that were quite grand but also dilapidated, like mansions with broken doors and entranceways covered in creeper,” Blomerus said. A blend of Namibian myrrh, Scotch pine and sweet basil wood is meant to capture the sense of past and currency with scents that are warm, earthy and calm.
Tanzer and Simpson researched dozens of factories in Europe, soliciting samples of bed sets to be washed and slept in again and again. They obsessed over weft and warp yarns and percale versus sateen before settling on a family-owned tailoring house and its sibling fabric house in Italy. Each Millaux sham, sheet and duvet cover is crafted from long Egyptian cotton sateen with a 610 thread count.
Duvet covers, sheets and pillowcases are available in a range of measurements to account for size variation across Swiss, European, British and American bed formats. Every piece can also be made to bespoke dimensions for a perfect fit. Pillowcases range from $195 to $370; fitted sheets are $655 to $890; and duvet covers are $780 to $1,420.
Like couture items, Millaux bedding is made to order. Unlike haute fashion, it is designed to withstand domestic laundering. Everything is machine-washable, though best to avoid extremely hot or aggressive spin cycles. Tanzer and Simpson, now living in New York, experience the realities of a communal building laundry room.
“I learned the hard way,” Tanzer said. “But it’s in the care label what not to do.”
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