During triumphal entries in Edinburgh in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, textiles were tools to communicate political messages not only visually, but experientially - elevating the daily reality of a civic event to the realm of staged spectacle. My paper explores the various uses of textiles as spatial and social signifiers during civic ceremonies. As canopies and covered walkways, they created portable “bubbles” of royal space; as pavilions they gave courtly, chivalrous connotations to otherwise neutral locations; and draped onto facades as tapestries, they conveyed three-dimensionally the parallel reality of myth. The transformative powers of textiles were applied to spectators through the enforcing of civic guidelines restricting, prescribing, or forbidding the use of some fabrics, cuts, and attires, to turn mere onlookers into performers dramatizing the well-ordered, content civic community it would please the monarch to witness.