If you flew in or out of the Portland airport this holiday season, you were ensured at least one celebrity sighting: the PDX carpet.
Ever since word got out that 13 acres of the teal carpet would be replaced starting this month, the carpet has achieved celebrity status.
There was a New York Times article titled “In Portland, It’s Curtains for an Airport Carpet,” an airline trade publication featured it in a spread titled “Cult Carpet,” and Portland Monthly magazine wrote a T.S. Eliot-inspired poem, “Ode on a Carpet, by T.S.A. Eliot.”
“Enthusiasm about carpet was probably not something we expected,” said Kama Simonds, spokeswoman with the Port of Portland.
The carpet has at least one dedicated Twitter account and a Facebook page with nearly 10,000 likes, and, if you search the hashtag #pdxcarpet on Instagram, hundreds of snapshots of people photographing their feet with the carpet underneath will appear.
For many travelers, the carpet symbolizes one simple message: You are home.
“It was startling, in a good way, that people loved the carpet so much. It really seemed to have an emotional attachment for travelers,” Simonds said.
Some people have taken their dedication to a new level; one woman has what appears to be a permanent tattoo of the carpet’s design on her shoulder and a university student directed a short film titled #PDXCARPET.
The current carpet was designed in the 1980s. The Port of Portland worked with SRG Partnership Inc. to create the design, which is an abstract rendering of the view that an air traffic controller sees when looking down at the airport at night.
The new carpet’s design aims to show existing shapes seen in areas of PDX and the city of Portland, ranging from airplane wings to leaves, trails and waterways. The colors were chosen, according to information from the port, to “elicit a calm environment, as well as colors found in green spaces, natural landscapes and flight paths.”
“It’s not a radical departure from the old design, so I think that’s the happy medium,” Simonds said. “It’s not the old one, it’s an updated version.”
In addition to the social media movement, the carpet has inspired a new industry: goods ranging from socks to bike jerseys to water bottles, coasters and scarves have been created using the carpet’s design.
Jeremy Dunn created a pair of socks with the carpet’s design in October 2013.
“The sock went totally crazy,” he said.
So crazy that Dunn was able to leave his job and open a store in Northwest Portland that has a range of apparel, including the airport socks.
But it’s unclear if the new carpet design will get any sock love from him.
“I don’t know if I could justify putting a bunch of money into making a sock that I didn’t necessarily stand behind,” he said.
It looks likely the carpet will have an afterlife. The Port of Portland is planning to give pieces of the carpet away through a social media campaign in the spring of 2015.
“The port believes in sustainability. We’re trying to find a way to recycle or repurpose the existing carpet as much as we can,” Simonds said.
Dunn already knows he wants to get “a little doormat made out of it” so people can come to his shop “and take pictures of their feet.”
