Stop and think about it. Have you ever seen your mother in a pair of pajamas?
It kind of scares me when I even try to picture my mom in pj’s. Not in this lifetime. Not on this earth.
My Ma is committed to cozy, shapeless pastel-colored nightgowns and has been as far back as she can remember–which is quite far indeed. She’s 83.
It turns out, there is quite a vigorous debate on the whole issue of pajamas vs. nightgowns. But, if you know a woman’s date of birth–actually, the year of her birth will do; we’re not talking astrology here–you have a very, very good chance of predicting where she stands in the great sleepwear divide.
Was she born before 1945 or so? Nightgown. Any time after that? Pajamas.
“There is definitely a generational aspect to it,” says Karen Neuburger, who is renowned for her line of cuddly sleepwear.
Earlier this year, in this very space, I wrote the obituary for the slip, an undergarment that is going the way of the girdle. As older women move on to that beddy bye in the sky, will it be time to say goodnight to the nightgown too?
The transformation is clearly under way, never more evident than at Christmastime–a huge season for buying sleepwear.
Neuburger says her pajamas are outselling nightgowns 3 to 1. Similarly, pajamas vastly outsell nightgowns at T.J. Maxx, which has 800 stores in the continental U.S. (30 in the Chicago area). And stats compiled by the NPD Group, a market research organization, show women’s pajama sales are up 9.2 percent for the 12 months ending last September.
Meanwhile, nightgowns in that same period were taking it in the shorts, so to speak. Gown sales were down 2.7 percent. In cold cash it was pj’s $1.6 billion vs. $526 million for nighties, about a 3-to-1 ratio.
But enough about the numbers. How about some serious shoe-leather reporting? What are real women wearing to sack out?
Although it seems like a rather intimate subject, I’ve found that women of all ages are happy, even eager, to talk about their preference.
Some typical responses:
“I never wear pajamas,” declares Libby Mott, 74, visiting Chicago from Cincinnati. “Never.”
“Pajamas!” says Jennifer Petsu, 32, a Chicago business owner. “I think of my mom or grandma wearing a nightgown.”
See what I mean by the generation thing?
Laura McDowell, a spokesperson for T.J. Maxx, likens the national pajama preference to the old skirts versus pants debate for daytime dressing. “Women 20 years ago would always wear skirts to the office. Now, many more are wearing pants.” McDowell, in her mid-30s, personally is a confirmed pajama-wearer. And her mom? “I haven’t seen my mother in pajamas.”
Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst for the NPD Group, traces the decline of the nightgown to the advent of the co-ed college dormitory, when young women fast concluded that if a man was going to see them in their sleepwear, it was not going to be some cozy, high-necked flannel bag that looked like it came from the wardrobe department of Little House on the Prairie.
And once that decision was made, most women stuck with it for the rest of their lives, Cohen says. “You gotta realize, Baby Boomers grew up in pj’s.”
Of course, like any generalization, there are exceptions. Older women who love pajamas. Younger ones who can’t abide the notion of sleeping in anything but a nightgown. And, yes, there are even some democratic types, young and old, who swing both ways depending on whim, season, whatever’s clean.
Not to mention those of us who fall asleep in our clothes, wear only a T-shirt to bed, wear our mate’s pj top or … nothing at all. These are not the people we’ve got in mind as we troll for a cute Christmas gift in the sleepwear department of Marshall Field’s or T.J. Maxx.
During the course of my in-depth research, I heard women defend their sleepwear choices with passion and conviction. Both sides of this great debate say comfort is key. The pj proponents insist that nightgowns wrap around you like a tourniquet. The same argument was used in defense of the gown. Mott, for instance, insisted that “you get all tangled up in pajamas.”
Neuburger, the sleepwear mogul, says, “I was raised by my grandparents and my grandmother wore a gown. … She would not be caught dead in pajamas.”
On that very point, Geri Thoma Lemert, visiting Chicago from New Haven, Conn., has something to add. When her beloved mother passed away a few years ago at age 71, she was buried–at her request–in a comfy pair of pink pajamas. An exception to the generation rule, Thoma Lemert said her mom, “definitely was a pajama girl!”
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shopellen@tribune.com
What do you sleep in? And why? Tell me at chicagotribune.com/ellen
