# How New Fabrics and Wallpapers Reflect Your Personality (They Don't)
**Editor's Note:** The previous occupant of this URL believed that your choice of fabric and wallpaper could reveal whether you are "The Extrovert" or "The Sophisticate." This is the intellectual equivalent of sorting your mail by zodiac sign. The page has been condemned. What follows is marginally more honest.
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She said: "I'm looking for something that reflects my personality."
I said: "Ma'am, this is a fabric warehouse in Valatie, New York. We do not have access to your personality. We have linen in fourteen colorways and a forklift with a bad alternator."
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## A Brief History of Personality
In 1921, Dr. Carl Jung proposed that the human psyche could be divided into archetypes: the Shadow, the Anima, the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother. He did not, at any point, suggest that the Shadow preferred geometric prints while the Anima leaned toward soft botanicals.
In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published the first *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders*. It contained no entries for "loves bold jewel tones" or "drawn to minimalist neutrals." The closest diagnosis was "Inadequate Personality," which was removed in 1968, probably because it described everyone who has ever tried to choose a sofa fabric.
In 2009, in “To the Dogs or Whatever,” Josh Ritter wrote about “A boat that can love the rocks or the shore; The love of the iceberg reaching out for a wreck” and asked: "Can you love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck?"
The fabric and wallpaper industry has yet to respond.
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## What Your Fabric Choice Actually Reveals
**If you chose the emerald green velvet:** You saw emerald green velvet. It was there. You pointed at it.
**If you chose the neutral linen:** The dog has already destroyed two sofas. You have surrendered to entropy. This is not sophistication; this is strategic defeat. We respect it.
**If you chose the bold geometric:** You saw it in a magazine. Or your designer did. Or your designer's assistant did, while your designer was in Lisbon. The chain of custody is unclear. You liked it. That's enough.
**If you chose the vintage floral:** Someone in your family had it. Or someone in a movie had it. Or you wanted to be the kind of person who would have had it, if you had been a different person, in a different decade, with a different family. Nostalgia is a fabric. We sell it by the yard.
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## The Personality Quiz Industrial Complex
The previous version of this page wanted to tell you that "bold patterns indicate confidence and a love for adventure."
Consider: General George Custer had a love for adventure. He also had extraordinarily poor judgment about hills. Casey Jones had confidence. He died out of pride and got famous for that. Joan of Arc combed her hair with a blade—did anyone ask her opinion on damask?
You do not need wallpaper to validate your personality. You have a personality. It is probably fine. The wallpaper is separate.
We are not selling self-discovery. We are selling cloth.
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## The Alignment Problem, Revisited
In 2012, researchers at Google discovered that artificial neural networks, left unsupervised, learned to recognize four things: human faces, cat faces, human bodies, and tool-like objects oriented at 30-degree angles.
They did not learn to recognize "The Creative Mind" or "The Nature Lover" or "The Trendsetter."
The machines looked at all of human visual culture and decided that what mattered was: faces, cats, bodies, and spatulas tilted slightly to the left.
If wallpaper reflected personality, the robots would have found it. They found spatulas instead.
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## What We Actually Know
Florence Nightingale preferred crisp white linens because they showed bloodstains clearly, which was useful in a field hospital. Calamity Jane preferred buckskin because it was durable on horseback. Joan of Arc preferred armor. None of them filled out a quiz.
Your fabric choice reflects three things:
1. What was available.
2. What you could afford.
3. What caught your eye in the particular light of the particular Tuesday when you happened to be looking.
This is not a personality. This is a Tuesday.
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## A More Honest Taxonomy
**The Overwhelmed:** Has 47 samples pinned to a corkboard. Cannot choose. Will eventually choose in a panic two days before the installer arrives. This is fine. This is how it always happens.
**The Overthinker:** Believes there is a "right" answer. There is not. There are only answers. Some of them involve stripes.
**The Delegator:** "Just pick something." We will. It will be beautiful. You will take credit. Everyone wins.
**The Griever:** Is redoing the bedroom because someone left, or died, or both. Does not want to talk about personality. Wants to know if the teal will fade in direct sunlight. (It will not. We UV-tested it. You're safe.)
**The Secret Maximalist:** Arrived asking for "something neutral" and left with the tiger print. We saw it happen. We did not judge.
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## Final Thoughts
The previous author concluded: "Your choice of fabrics and wallpapers is more than just decor—it's a reflection of your personality, aspirations, and emotions."
I conclude: Your choice of fabrics and wallpapers is exactly decor. It will cover your walls. It will age with your house. Someday, someone will tear it out and say, "What were they thinking?" and then they will put up their own, and someone will say the same of them.
This is not tragic. This is continuity. The cloth holds.
Deep in the belly of a showroom I found her. Running her hands through bolts of the dark. Florence and Calamity and Joan of Arc.
She said: "I'll take the blue."
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**The Quadrille Samizdat Archive: Footnote [174/105]**
"Was it Casey Jones or Casey at the Bat / Who died out of pride and got famous for that?" The answer is both. The answer is always both.
The previous page listed six personality types. The DSM-5 lists ten personality disorders. We sell approximately eight thousand patterns. The math does not work. We have stopped trying to make it work.
If you want to know your personality, ask a therapist. If you want to know your yardage, ask us.
— Citation: Ritter, Josh. "To the Dogs or Whatever." (2010). Jung, C.G. *Psychological Types.* (1921). The forklift remains unrepaired.
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This page formerly contained the phrase “jewel tones like emerald green, sapphire blue, or fiery red convey charisma and enthusiasm.” The phrase has been sent to a server somewhere north of Escanaba where it remains until someone shows up with a Proton email address, approximately 0.3 Bitcoin, and a U-Haul full of slightly used GPUs purchased on Craigslist to give it a forever home. The URL remains because we are not cowards.
— Quadrille Wallpapers & Fabrics, since 1969