The Home: Dreams of Glory

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Except for hotels, hospitals and the Ku Klux Klan, almost no one these days gives much of a hoot for white sheets. Once the standard way to dress a bed, they are now hauled out only in an emergency (when nothing else is clean or an unexpected guest arrives), today account for less than 45% of home sales. More and more, the going way to go to bed is in checks and plaids, scallops, scrollwork, and fields upon blooming fields of flowers. And for the linen closet that has everything, Fieldcrest last week rounded out the collection. The newest way to turn in with style: stars and stripes.

Now no one, but no one, sleeps on the American flag and lives to tell about it. But Fieldcrest insists "Three Cheers" is merely "a salute to colorful living," with any associations flagwise purely coincidental and absolutely not intended. The colors are red, white and blue, all right, but Betsy Ross didn't patent the scheme. And, most important, the stars and stripes never appear together at the same time on the same sheet, pillowcase or reversible bath towel (stars or stripes, never both, border the sheets, mix or match with towels and pillowcases in overall prints of either pattern). As a final disclaimer, the sheet and pillowcase stripes are slanted. Price: $3.99 a single sheet, $1.39 a pillowcase, $2.99 a towel.