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.
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