Why do Americans wear pajamas in public?

The thing that makes a pajama a pajama

A pajama is the only garment in the wardrobe defined by location rather than construction. A tracksuit is a tracksuit in the gym, on a plane and at the shops. A pajama is a pair of soft trousers that becomes a pajama by being in a bedroom. Put the identical trousers on a runway and they are fashion. Which means the category only survives if something keeps enforcing the boundary — and that something is not fabric. It is other people.

America removed the other people

This is the same argument we made about why Parisians dress to buy bread, running in reverse. In central Paris more than half of all journeys are made on foot, so leaving the flat means twenty minutes in public whether you wanted them or not. In the United States roughly nine in ten shopping trips are made by car. You leave through an internal garage, drive inside a sealed box with a windscreen between you and everyone, park close to the door and walk twelve metres. There is no stretch of that journey where you are simply a person in public. The audience that used to police the boundary has been designed out of the route.

Look at where it actually happens

Not everywhere — and the pattern gives the game away. School drop-off, where you never leave the car. The drive-through. A petrol station. Target at nine in the morning. An overnight flight. Every one of those is a setting with a car in it, or a short dash between two private spaces, or a place where everyone has already agreed to stop looking. Nobody wears pajamas to a restaurant. The behaviour is not indifference to being seen. It is a fairly precise reading of when you will not be.

It has been banned in more places than you would guess

And not mainly in America, which is the part that undoes the easy version of this story. A Tesco in St Mellons, Cardiff put up a dress code in January 2016 asking customers not to shop in nightwear, after staff noticed a steady stream of dressing gowns in the frozen aisle. Dublin’s Department of Social Protection told clients in 2012 that pajamas were not appropriate attire for a welfare office. Shanghai discouraged the practice during Expo 2010. American school districts in Georgia, Texas, Michigan and California banned pajamas years ago, and Fairfax County in Virginia moved to add them to its code, on the reasoning that “pajama bottoms are pajama bottoms.”

The moment the whole thing collapsed

In August 2020 the school board in Springfield, Illinois applied its in-person dress code to remote learning. Students attending class from their own houses were told they could not wear pajama pants — and were also instructed to get out of bed, sit at a table and look into the camera. Which is either the last defence of a boundary or proof that it had already gone, depending on where you are standing. A rule forbidding pajamas in a bedroom is a rule that has lost track of what a bedroom is for.

Some of it is genuinely fashion

Worth conceding, because the sneering version of this article ignores it. Pajama dressing is a real movement with real designers behind it: Miu Miu, The Row and Michael Kors have all worked the look, silk sets and slip dresses styled with a jacket, and brands now make linen sets specifically intended to go out. A well-cut silk pajama set worn deliberately is not the same object as flannel bottoms with monkeys on them worn because the alarm went twice. Both are on the pavement. Only one of them is an accident.

Why the French do not need a rule

Not superior restraint. No opportunity. If the bakery is four blocks away and you are walking, you will pass a neighbour, the woman from the school gate and someone who knows your mother-in-law. The French have a phrase children hear on the way out — on ne sait jamais qui on peut croiser, you never know who you might run into — and it is not advice about grooming. It is a description of what is about to happen. Remove the walking and the phrase stops meaning anything, which is roughly what happened to American suburbs.

His actual objection

I assumed it would be about standards. It was not. His position is that the pajama is a good and specific object, that its entire value is in marking the end of the day, and that wearing it at ten in the morning in a car park destroys the only thing it was for. He is not offended on behalf of the public. He is offended on behalf of the pajama. I have decided this is the most French position available and I am not going to argue with it.

Where it happens, and why

He judges America weekly on Instagram, and Le Bulletin collects the best of it once a month.