One of the first things that Laura Tanzer used to do when checking into a hotel room on a work trip was call her then-girlfriend (now wife) and describe the bedding. As a creative assistant for Balenciaga, she travelled nearly nine months a year; her girlfriend Jessica Simpson, then a professional tennis player, clocked up a similar number of hotel stays. The discussions about bedding “were an important part of our love language,” Tanzer says. But Tanzer realised that clothes for the body were not necessarily the “canvas I wanted to paint on”. Instead, it was “bed clothes” that sparked her imagination. “I love that bed clothes are so sensual,” she says, “you use them every day but there are so many interesting directions we could take people on.” Like fashion, “there’s an art to styling your bed; you can change it according to your mood and play with it.”

Together with Simpson she launched the new “haute couture” bedding brand Millaux: custom made in traditional ateliers (“beds come in all kinds of sizes”), from 100 per cent European flax linen woven in Portugal, or traceable 600-plus thread-count Italian-made Egyptian cotton sateen, with prints by Fiona Blakeman, who designed under Phoebe Philo at Céline. The aim of the “collection” is to mix and match, as Tanzer and Simpson have always done at home in their Zurich apartment. So, a striped duvet with a leopard print pillowcase for example, but also of textures: they like a sandwich of linen and sateen.