The Rise, Fall & Rise of the PJs

by Anthony Husher Writter

There is something wonderful modern about pyjamas. The ultimate symbol of being 'at ease', Brits have taken things so far as to have given supermarket chains cause to actually ban the wearing thereof in their shops. Students at my school - I am young enough to remember - were often reprimanded by angry pedagogues for wearing them. Needless to say it was a boarding school, but the point stands.

Of course, as modern as they are, they had actually been out of fashion for decades before their recent resurgence. Even in my childhood - these references should be giving you a fairly accurate idea of my age if you know your pyjama history - my contemporaries and I all declared pyjamas for children as soon as we had so much as dipped toes in puberty. We at once refused to continue to wear the garments and declared any continuation of the sporting of such jejune articles unacceptable and utterly uncool.

Of course, the absurdity of this all seems laughable now. But little did we know as children PJs are far older than our own early adolescent protestations. The apparel dates back, in fact, to the chosen night-time clothing of the Persians. The two-piece combination caught on as far as what is now modern-day India, and it was there at the turn of the 19th / 20th centuries that British expeditionaries came across them and imported them home to Britain.

From the British Empire's Raj - and it is often forgotten that the Empire was as much based on cultural as geographical exploration - to the modern day ban on children PJs in Tesco, there have been many decades for the humble garment to establish itself as so thoroughly a stalwart of British culture that you may have found yourself surprised to learn that it was not, after all, the British who came up with them. This in no way detracts from their Britishness, of course - for where would we be without tea from Persia, fish and chips from Spanish Jews or chocolate from the south Americas?

One answer to that question might be that we would be here, but with a more overtly 'local' culture. Some wish this for Britain, in fact, although ironically the most strident defenders of 'Britishness' - the most nationalist and patriotic of pundits - are often most enamoured with those elements of our culture that have come from abroad. And for British childrens pyjamas are of course as homely as anything - it hardly matters that their distant history is one that stretches back not only through time, but also across oceans and cultures. There is even something romantic and exciting about the thought, isn't there?

And even if there wasn't - even if we really did hanker after those 'native' British things (cabbage, horseflies and rain) - we would have to admit, sooner or later, that everything came from somewhere else at some point or other in history. Perhaps the nearness of that history in the case of Britain merely serves to remind us of the emancipating and exhilarating fact that, in the eyes of history, we really are all 'cut from the same block'. Something to think about when next you don your PJs.