Lounge pajamas, c. 1935 - FIDM Museum

By A Mystery Man Writer

During the 1920s, pajamas moved from bedroom to beach. Though pajama style pants were suggested by Paul Poiret as avant garde dress during the teens, pajamas were worn primarily as sleepwear until the 1920s. Sometime during the mid-to-late 1920s, pajamas appeared outside the bedroom as swimsuit cover-ups on the beaches of the French Riviera. Beach pajamas soon became a double-duty garment for the relaxed resort lifestyle, one that navigated easily from beach to cocktail party. In 1931, Vogue magazine declared, "A woman may and does wear pyjamas to quite formal dinners in her own house, to other people's dinners in town and country if you know them well and the more iconoclastic members of the female sex even wear them to the theatre."1 For women who aspired to a resort lifestyle but didn't have the necessary means or leisure, pajamas could be worn for entertaining or relaxing at home. Worn in these situations, beach pajamas became lounge pajamas or sometimes "lounjamas."2 During the 1920s, beach or lounge pajamas were usually two-piece ensembles accompanied by a matching jacket. By the 1930s, one-piece, jumpsuit-style pajamas had emerged. These one-piece lounge pajamas from the FIDM Museum collection are shaped with a self-fabric sash and fasten with a 3-button closure on the left side. Like menswear of the same period, these lounge pajamas feature a wide leg. Lounge pajamas c. 1935 Gift of the Manlove Family 2006.870.1AB