While you were sleeping: A writer takes the pyjama dressing trend out of the boudoir and into the light of day

When I was growing up, I used to visit my grandmother in Palm Beach,
where she wintered in a conch-pink pseudo Spanish-style condo called
(accurately) La Bonne Vie. My favourite activity was grocery shopping at
Palm Beach’s Publix—a glamorized supermarket washed a bunny-nose pink
with valet parking and bougainvillea-swathed archways. Here, tycoons
with Hermès-orange suntans and manses on Billionaire’s Row shuffled
through the aisles dressed in silken Persian pyjamas and monogrammed
velvet bedroom slippers, carts full of crab salad, their long-suffering
chauffeurs waiting outside in purring Bentleys. Wearing pyjamas outside
of the bedroom has historically been the habit of the egregiously
wealthy, the eccentric, the hyper-medicated on day passes—and the
freelance writer.



I’ll admit that as I write this, I’m sporting my favourite pair of
Liberty Print J.Crew man-jams. In my defense, it’s a grouchy-skied fall
afternoon, with clouds heaped like an unmade bedspread—ideal weather for
pyjama wearing, like clear skies and tail winds for pilots. But the
jammy trend du jour is hardly limited to oversized drawstring pants and
piped tops. For Louis Vuitton’s Fall 2013 fashion show,
models in dark ’50s wigs and plummy pouts drifted down the runway in
fur-edged peignoirs and lace-trimmed negligees half-hidden under
oversized astrakhan coats. The mise-en-scène: 50 numbered
wooden doors lined a catwalk-turned-walk-of-shame to evoke a plush,
tryst-inviting hotel, the sort where women in various stages of
post-indiscretion undress might wander before escaping into the dusky
wee smalls. The palette—decadent and drowsy—slipped from shades of
champagne to dreamy, moony blues to inky midnights. And the look, plush
with the poetry of melancholy, conjured that romantic liminal moment
before the first flush of dawn and the vulgar daytime glare of
consequence. For the occasion, Marc Jacobs took his bow
in PJs from Vuitton’s recent men’s collection. (The so-called Garden In
Hell pattern by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman took inspiration
from Diana Vreeland’s red-lacquer apartment.) Meanwhile, for his Marc
Jacobs collection, the designer accoutred his models in dark,
well-mussed (presumably from time spent au lit) shag wigs and
glamourpuss silk pyjamas in shimmery shades of gold and gunmetal. (He
opted to don a pair of Prada ’jams for the bow.)


But Jacobs is not the only designer to introduce pyjamas to the light of day. For Rochas’s
Fall 2013 show, fluid silk ’jams in shades of raincloud grey were
paired with diamond necklaces for a look of coiffed indolence. There is
nothing as chic as leisure, and py-jamas are leisure’s timeless uniform.