Shrug on a velvet smoking jacket, slip into a velvet dress, string a velvet choker around your neck, and voila you’ve cordoned yourself behind an elusive velvet rope. In placing yourself on the other side of velvet, or rather, placing velvet between you and the grimy world, you signal that, like an exclusive club or works of art at a museum, you have value and interest. You’re luxuriously enveloped and daring someone to touch you. Maybe a dare is all it is, and certainly it’s all it needs to be. Maybe you just want to absent-mindedly pet yourself. Then again, maybe you’ll purr to every person you speak to for longer than a second, here, touch, feel. Maybe you’ll remove the velvet rope and let someone in.
Sam Maceo’s family came to America from the port town of Palermo in Sicily, a region separated by a narrow waterway from the Italian peninsula through which velvet entered the wider western market centuries before. In 1910 the family arrived in another port town, Galveston, Texas. Here, Sam would gain renown alongside his brother, Rosario, and acquire his nickname, “The Velvet Glove,” for his smooth popularity and remarkable grace. Rose served as enforcer, the iron fist behind Sam’s velvet glove demeanor. The Velvet Glove and Rose, perhaps the most romantically monikered gangsters, turned the island into “The Free State of Galveston.” They bucked prohibition and established a bootlegging operation that gave them the keys to the underworld empire they would build.
The vice economy of Galveston was openly tolerated by locals and drew tourists to the island year-round. The brothers’ combination of easy charm and fortitude worked in tandem to open glamorous clubs, the first in the country to offer fine food, star-studded entertainment, gambling, and alcohol under one roof. These clubs operated alongside a thriving red light district, with around fifty bordellos. The girls working in these bordellos throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s would likely have owned a velvet dress. By this time, the material’s overwhelming sensuousness marked its wearer with a certain notoriety – a sexually experienced woman, a free spirit.
Velvet is the most popular choice of casket lining. Another velvet rope of sorts, establishing a barrier of separation from the world. This, though, not a cordon of exclusivity, but of finality. At a funeral, you’re likely to walk past an open casket and see the cold skin of the deceased laid against the soft embrace of velvet, both enticing, both daring you to reach out and touch, just the softest stroke. In the necropolis beneath us lie row after row of final beds made up in the luxurious pile: the velvet underworld.