The pyjama is one of the few garments in a modern wardrobe that arrived from somewhere else entirely, changed its meaning several times, and is still changing it. For something so associated with staying in, it has travelled a great deal.
The word came first
Pyjama comes into English from Hindi and Urdu, drawn in turn from Persian: pāy, meaning leg, and jāma, meaning garment. Loose trousers, gathered at the waist with a drawstring, worn across South Asia and much of the Middle East by men and women alike, in daylight, as ordinary clothing.
It was not nightwear. That happened later, and it happened in Britain.
How it became something to sleep in?
British colonists in India adopted the garment for its obvious comfort in heat, and brought it home. Through the nineteenth century it began displacing the nightshirt in English bedrooms, first as a curiosity and then as the standard. By the end of the century the pyjama was established as men’s nightwear, and its origins were largely forgotten in the process.
Women’s nightwear remained the nightgown, and stayed there rather longer. The idea of a woman in trousers of any kind still carried weight, and putting her in them at night was not a small step.
The moment it became women’s clothing
The change came from two directions at once, and both were about the seaside.
In the 1920s, wide-legged beach pyjamas became fashionable on the French Riviera, a form of resort dress that gave women trousers without quite calling them trousers. Coco Chanel is closely associated with the look, and it spread from a small fashionable circle to a general one with unusual speed.
At roughly the same time, women began adopting men’s pyjamas for sleeping, and cinema did the rest. Hollywood in the 1930s put women on screen in menswear-cut nightwear, and what had been slightly transgressive became aspirational within a few years.
It is worth pausing on this, because it is the interesting part. The pyjama did not become women’s clothing by being redesigned for women. It became women’s clothing by being taken.
The century since
From there the garment kept slipping between categories. Palazzo pyjamas and evening pyjamas appeared in the 1960s and 1970s as legitimate eveningwear, cut in silk and worn to dinner. Designers returned to the shape repeatedly, drawn to the fact that it is one of the few forms in the wardrobe that is simultaneously formal in structure and entirely relaxed in fit.
More recently the traffic has run the other way, and pyjama dressing has become a recognised way of taking sleepwear out of the house: the piped shirt worn under a coat, the drawstring trouser worn with a heeled shoe. What began as daywear that became nightwear has spent the last century trying to get back out again.
Why has the shape lasted?
Almost nothing else in the wardrobe has survived a hundred and fifty years with its proportions essentially unchanged. The reason is that the pyjama was solving a problem correctly the first time.
A straight trouser with a drawstring fits a range of bodies and a range of days. A camp collar and a placket give structure without constriction. There is no engineering in it and nothing to go out of date, which is why every attempt to modernise the pyjama tends to produce something that is either a pyjama or a mistake.
The piping, incidentally, was originally functional. Corded edging reinforced the seams on garments expected to be washed constantly. It survives now as decoration, which is the usual fate of good engineering.
What it means to choose one?
There is a version of the pyjama that is bought without thought, worn until it is grey, and replaced with another of the same. There is another version that is chosen, in the way a coat is chosen, and kept.
The difference is not really about money. It is about whether the hours spent in the garment are considered worth dressing for. A century of women deciding that the answer was yes is what produced the pyjama as we have it, and the question is still open every time someone buys one.