During the past decade, a specific form of women’s sleepwear has achieved total cultural dominance, the matching button front pajama set, usually featuring a notched collar, matching trousers or shorts, and, most importantly, contrasting piping around the collar, cuffs, pockets, and hems. The piping is essential. Without it, there would be insufficient visual evidence that the wearer is resting. Now prior to this plague, if I encountered a woman wearing these I would have simply thought, “Those are nice pajamas,” and continued with my life. But i have now seen six million women wearing some variation of them while also holding the same ceramic mug. (And I hate that mug so much that I made the suspect pictured with this essay drink from a teacup instead, AND ONLY USING ONE HAND - NO TWO HANDS AGGGHHH). Ok so, I have now seen this choice of sleepwear so many times that I no longer perceive them as pajamas. I perceive them as torture. This raises a question that I believe deserves considerably more attention than it has received: what happened to the entire history of sleeping in random shit?
I remember women going to bed before Instagram. I was there. The evidence is overwhelming that options once existed. There was, first and perhaps most importantly, the giant T-shirt. This was a remarkably versatile garment. It might have belonged to the woman wearing it. It might have belonged to a boyfriend. It might have belonged to somebody she had not spoken to in eleven years. It might say TAMPA BAY SEAFOOD FESTIVAL 2004 across the front despite nobody in the household having any memory of attending such an event. Its provenance was irrelevant. Nobody knew where the shirt came from, and nobody needed to know. It was comfortable. It had survived. That was enough. That was a pajama.
There were other possibilities. There were tank tops and boy shorts. There were boxer shorts. There were basketball shorts. There were oversized button-down shirts. There were sweatpants, sports bras, little sleep dresses, college sweatshirts, underwear with a T-shirt, and ancient pajama bottoms covered in moons and stars that had survived three presidential administrations. There were camisoles. I specifically remember camisoles. Apparently, at some point, the camisole was packed into an archival box and sent to the Smithsonian.
There was also the free promotional T-shirt, a category of clothing that deserves special recognition. This was often a shirt a person would never willingly wear outside the house, yet through years of service as sleepwear it somehow acquired the status of a sacred textile. A woman could own four hundred dollars’ worth of actual sleepwear and still reach instinctively for a faded shirt advertising an insurance company that ceased operations in 2009. There was dignity in this.
Matching pajamas, of course, existed throughout this entire period. I am not arguing that women never wore matching pajamas until TikTok was invented. That would be ridiculous. Matching pajamas were simply one animal in a much larger sleepwear ecosystem. What interests me is how one species appears to have taken over the entire habitat.
This is particularly strange because modern consumers have access to a degree of clothing variety that would have been unimaginable to almost any previous generation. There are thousands of brands, vintage stores, resale platforms, independent designers, international retailers, and enormous online marketplaces. Clothing from nearly anywhere in the world can arrive at one’s house within days. In theory, this should be one of the most visually diverse periods in the history of personal style. Instead, social media has somehow taken an unprecedented abundance of choice and produced an extraordinary degree of aesthetic convergence. We have achieved nearly infinite choice and selected piping.
That contradiction is much more interesting to me than the pajamas themselves. Social media did not eliminate choice. It created an environment in which certain choices communicate more efficiently than others. The matching piped pajama set has become useful because it does not merely cover the body. It instantly communicates a scenario. These are no longer simply pajamas. They are camera pajamas. They are clothing designed, consciously or otherwise, to perform the concept of being at home.
An enormous Wu-Tang T-shirt does not provide the camera with enough information. If I see a photograph of a woman wearing one at nine in the morning, I have questions. Did she just wake up? Is she cleaning the garage? Is she going to Target? Has she been awake for thirty-six hours? There is ambiguity. The piped pajama set eliminates this problem. Put a woman in matching pajamas, place a ceramic mug in her hands, position her near a window, and the meaning becomes immediately legible.
She is having a morning.
The mug, naturally, cannot be an ordinary mug. It should be some handmade ceramic object that appears to have been recently excavated from the earth. She should hold it with both hands. She should stand near a window and look outside without appearing to look at anything in particular. Ideally, she should gaze vaguely toward her future. Her hair should be tousled, although not so tousled that anyone could reasonably believe she slept on it. The resulting photograph can then be captioned “Slow mornings,” despite the fact that she has been awake for three hours setting up the camera.
There is nothing slow about this morning. This morning has a production schedule.
The larger problem is not that this image is unattractive. It is attractive. It is polished. It is, to use one of the most exhausting words in contemporary lifestyle culture, elevated. Everything is elevated now. We have elevated basics, elevated essentials, elevated loungewear, elevated casualwear, elevated home goods, and elevated pajamas. At some point, however, one has to ask whether anything is still permitted to remain downstairs.
The concept of elevation also depends upon contrast. A beautiful black silk pajama set looks sophisticated partly because it exists in a world in which somebody else is asleep in a giant DAYTONA BEACH 1998 T-shirt. That woman is providing the contrast. She is doing important cultural work. If everyone is polished, then polish ceases to distinguish anything. If everyone is put together, “put together” is no longer an aesthetic achievement. It is a dress code.
This is why I am not interested in replacing the piped pajama set with some newly approved version of casual sleepwear. I do not want the oversized T-shirt to become the next elevated object. Please do not take a giant shitty T-shirt, manufacture it from artisanal Japanese cotton, charge $175 for it, call it “The Boyfriend,” and tell me that it has been reimagined for the modern woman. Do not elevate that too. That is how we got here. Sometimes the giant shitty T-shirt is the finished product.
What I am asking for, therefore, is not the abolition of matching pajamas. I am asking for sleepwear biodiversity.
Keep the pajamas. They are lovely. Wear them. But allow some chaos back into the ecosystem. I would like to see someone drinking coffee in an enormous faded Atlanta Braves T-shirt and underwear. I would like boxer shorts and a tank top. I would like someone to wear a nightgown that makes her look like a wealthy widow in 1943 whose husband died under circumstances nobody in town is entirely comfortable discussing. I would like someone to go full 1980s and wear a T-shirt that reaches her knees. Someone else can go 1994 with boxers and a white tank top. Someone can go 2003 with Juicy Couture sweatpants and a camisole. Wear a gigantic hoodie with nothing anyone can identify happening underneath it. Sleep in a Slipknot shirt. Wear an elegant silk robe. Wear flannel pants covered in penguins. I do not care. I am simply asking to be surprised.
Most importantly, somebody should wear mismatched pajamas. Pajama bottoms from one thing and a shirt from something completely unrelated used to be an unremarkable consequence of living in a house. It has now become an act of radical individualism. I am not demanding fashion. I am demanding evidence that you arrived at your own house independently.
This is what makes influencer culture so fascinating. Trends themselves are not unusual. Human beings have always copied one another. Fashion could scarcely exist without imitation. What is unusual is the recurring performance of having independently arrived at precisely the same conclusion as everyone else. “I’ve just really been loving matching sets lately.” Have you? What an extraordinary coincidence. So have eight hundred thousand other people holding beige mugs. Hundreds of thousands of people independently discovered contrast piping within approximately the same eighteen-month period. Scientists should study this.
Again, none of this means there is anything wrong with owning these pajamas. A person should own a pair if she likes them. Own two. The situation only becomes concerning when I open a closet and discover seven variations of the same object: navy piping, white piping, pink piping, Christmas piping, summer piping, perhaps some special transitional piping for early autumn. At that point, I am forced to consider the possibility that this person is no longer merely sleeping. She may be employed by the pajama industry.
There is also a personal reason I know my objection cannot really be to the pajamas themselves. Around 2014 or 2015, I dated a woman who owned a black silky pajama set with white piping. I remember lying in bed with her while she wore them and drank tea, and I remember thinking she looked lovely. I did not regard the pajamas as evidence of a cultural emergency. I barely thought about them at all. In retrospect, however, the scene is almost suspiciously perfect: woman, bed, piped pajamas, tea. The entire contemporary social-media image was already present.
This appears to have been the containment period.
There were isolated cases, but the situation had not yet become alarming.
That memory is useful because it establishes an important distinction. If I were dating someone today and she wore the same pajamas, I would still think they looked nice. My only request would be that, at some point, she demonstrate the continued existence of independent thought in the field of sleepwear. Wear the pajamas Monday. Fine. On Tuesday, surprise me. Wear an enormous T-shirt from a bowling alley in Ohio. I need to know that you can think for yourself with the pajamas.
For this reason, I would like to propose a modest experiment. Tonight, go into your closet and walk past the matching set. Do not destroy it. Do not donate it. Simply keep walking. Find the stupidest comfortable thing you own. Find the shirt from 2007, the weird shorts, the tank top you forgot existed, or the promotional T-shirt from a company that went bankrupt during the Obama administration. Put that on. Wake up tomorrow morning and make your coffee.
Then, perhaps most radically of all, do not photograph it.
Just stand there for a moment looking like absolute shit.
Like our ancestors intended.
Enough with these pajamas.
