Men's Night Attire

There is something rather touching about traditional men's nightwear. Like military parade uniforms, it belongs to a category of male clothing that long ago escaped the realm of practicality and entered the world of ritual, symbolism and theatre. Nobody needs a bearskin hat to fight a war and nobody needs a paisley dressing gown to go to bed, yet both survive because men have always harboured a secret affection for costumes that make them feel slightly grander than reality warrants. 

 We effectively reached peak development sometime around 1893 and collectively decided there was no need to continue.

The entire category consists largely of tartan, paisley, velvet, piping and the faint implication that one may, at any moment, retire to a library to discuss the Boer War over a brandy.

A Victorian gentleman could apparently choose between paisley dressing gown, slightly different paisley dressing gown, or perhaps tartan if he was feeling dangerously continental.

What makes this even more gloriously British is that the whole thing was essentially an imperial collage assembled with complete confidence and very little self-awareness. Pyjamas themselves arrived from India, the word deriving from Hindi and Urdu. British colonial administrators discovered that loose cotton garments were rather more sensible in tropical heat than perspiring gently to death in European nightshirts, and promptly imported the idea home.

Paisley, meanwhile, came from Persian and Indian motifs encountered through empire and trade. The famous curved pattern became associated with the Scottish town of Paisley because its mills industrialised the design for mass consumption. Thus an ancient Asian pattern ended up wrapped around retired colonels in Tunbridge Wells complaining about railway timetables.

Tartan followed a different route. After the Jacobite rising of 1745, Highland culture was initially suppressed, only to be rebranded a century later into romantic imperial pageantry by people like Sir Walter Scott and embraced enthusiastically by Queen Victoria at Balmoral. What had once signified rebellion became reassuring establishment upholstery.

Then there was the polka dot variant. The final flourish in the taxonomy of traditional male nocturnal absurdity. Nothing says "serious Edwardian gentleman" quite like appearing at breakfast dressed as a melancholy casino table.

Polka dots occupied a curious middle ground between respectable domesticity, theatrical eccentricity, and retired barrister who keeps tropical fish. Unlike tartan, which implied rugged Highland virtue, or paisley, which hinted at imperial sophistication, polka dots suggested a man who owned a gramophone and perhaps laughed slightly too loudly at dinner parties.

So by the late Victorian period, the British gentleman's night attire had become an extraordinary cultural stew: Indian trousers, Persian motifs, Scottish weaving, Highland romanticism, polka dots, velvet lapels, and enough quilted fabric to reline a frigate.

And yet despite this vast imperial inheritance, men's nightwear still somehow managed to end up looking exactly like the lounge uniform of a mildly disappointed solicitor in Cheltenham.

Mind you, I never wear anything in bed anyway. My own brief flirtation with traditional night attire came at boarding school under the influence of British Kenyan cadets, where for a while I wore what everyone loosely called a "Kikuyu". In reality it was closer to a kikoi - a simple East African wrap that made infinitely more sense than swaddling oneself in enough velvet and tartan to upholster a minor stately home.

That, too, felt oddly imperial Britain. A handful of Kenyan pupils arrive at a boarding school and within months half the dormitory has adopted some fragment of East African clothing tradition with only the vaguest understanding of where it came from. The British talent for importing practical ideas from abroad, slightly misunderstanding them, and then institutionalising them as though Nelson himself had slept in one, is genuinely world class.

And in truth, once central heating arrived and British houses ceased trying to kill their occupants overnight, much traditional male nightwear became less necessity and more theatre. The smoking jacket survives because men secretly enjoy the idea that they may one day need to receive troubling news from a butler at midnight.

The reality is usually standing barefoot in the kitchen at 1am eating cheddar directly from the packet while illuminated by the fridge light like a failed minor aristocrat.

Meanwhile, women's nightwear evolved into an entire parallel civilisation. Silk, lace, satin, chiffon, embroidery, peignoirs, chemises, quilted robes, tea gowns, bias cuts, feather trims, sheer fabrics, floral prints, cinematic glamour, practical flannel, Parisian elegance, Hollywood seduction, cottagecore before anyone had invented the irritating word "cottagecore".

A man's traditional bedtime aspiration was essentially: "I hope to resemble a mildly prosperous duke with gout."

A woman's could range from "ethereal Pre-Raphaelite muse" to "1930s film star descending a staircase", or from "French aristocrat awaiting scandal" to "warm but threatening Welsh aunt in a quilted housecoat".

Even now, men's luxury nightwear still circles endlessly around the same exhausted formula: dark colours, monograms, velvet lapels and the sort of garments that make a retired dentist look as though he's about to explain imperial trade routes to a Labrador.

You occasionally see modern catalogues trying heroically to revive the genre. "Luxury men's loungewear" they call it now, because "dressing gown" no longer sounds aspirational enough. Yet beneath the marketing fog, it is still fundamentally a robe for standing in the kitchen at 11pm wondering whether another biscuit constitutes emotional collapse.

Women's nightwear, by contrast, still contains drama. Narrative. Delusion. Costume design. Entire emotional states stitched into fabric.

Men get: "I am indoors."

Women get: "I may be indoors, but I contain multitudes."

And frankly, looking at the average middle-aged man shambling about in an old T-shirt from a failed plumbing exhibition and a pair of collapsing elasticated shorts, perhaps civilisation made the correct call.