There is a particular kind of morning — light coming in sideways, the house still quiet — when the clothes you're wearing feel less like a choice and more like a philosophy. Loose, soft, unhurried. The history of pajamas begins far from that moment, in the loose-draped leg garments of South Asia and Persia, where the word itself — from the Persian and Urdu pae jama, meaning "leg garment" — described lightweight trousers worn by men and women alike for centuries (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023). Carried westward by British colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries, these garments would spend the next three hundred years quietly transforming from utilitarian sleepwear into one of the most considered symbols of comfort, femininity, and self-expression in the modern wardrobe. Today, the pajama is no longer simply what you wear to bed — it is a statement about how you choose to live. After nearly thirty years designing sleepwear at Eberjey, what we've learned is that the customers who care most about this history are always the ones who understand, instinctively, that what you wear to rest is as intentional as anything else you put on.
What Is the Origin of the Word "Pajamas"?
Long before the word appeared in any English dictionary, pae jama was a practical reality across the Indian subcontinent and Persia. The garment described by that phrase — loose trousers tied at the waist, cut wide enough to allow ease of movement in the heat — was everyday dress, not sleepwear (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023). People of all genders wore it, adapted to local climate, made from whatever lightweight fiber was locally abundant: cotton, silk, hand-loomed muslin.
When British East India Company traders and colonial administrators arrived in India from the 17th century onward, they encountered a garment radically more effortless than the wool breeches and tightly laced fashions of European dress. Many adopted a version of the pae jama for private use — specifically for sleeping — and carried the habit home (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2019). By the time "pajamas" entered the Oxford English Dictionary (first recorded usage: 1800), the word already carried the ambiguity it still holds today: a garment that straddles the boundary between private and public.
When Were Pajamas First Worn in the Western World?
The Victorian era brought pajamas to Britain, but not without resistance. For most of the 19th century, the dominant nightwear in Europe was the nightgown — a long, loose shift that bore more resemblance to a chemise than to anything approaching considered dress (Smithsonian Magazine, 2018). Men began adopting the pajama suit — a two-piece with a banded collar top and drawstring trousers — as informal "at-home" wear in the latter half of the century, often in fine cotton or silk imported from India or China.
Women's relationship with pajamas was considerably slower to develop, bound up as it was in Victorian conventions about propriety and the female body. The idea that a woman might wear trousers — even to sleep — was considered either eccentric or dangerously modern (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2019). It would take the upheaval of the early 20th century to change that.
How Did Pajamas Become a Fashion Statement?
The story of pajamas as fashion begins with the cultural rupture of the 1920s. The First World War had dismantled enormous amounts of social convention around women's dress and movement. Into this opening stepped a generation of designers who understood that women's bodies deserved clothes shaped around comfort and ease — not performance for others.
Among them, Coco Chanel was pivotal. Her adoption of wide-legged, pajama-inspired trousers for resort and beach wear in the early 1920s gave the silhouette a social legitimacy it had never previously enjoyed (Smithsonian Magazine, 2018). Photographs from this period show fashionable women on the French Riviera in flowing, pajama-cut trousers and loose silk tops — wearing, essentially, luxurious loungewear in public without apology. The pajama had crossed a threshold: it was a posture, an attitude, a quiet refusal to be uncomfortable for appearances' sake.
The 1930s deepened this association. Hollywood glamour — specifically the long, silk pajama sets worn by stars like Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard in screwball comedies and bedroom farces — embedded the image of the elegant woman in pajamas into the popular imagination (Smithsonian Magazine, 2018). These were not afterthought garments. They were deliberate, sensuous, and modern.
How Did Sleepwear Evolve Through the Mid-20th Century?
The post-war decades produced a complicated chapter in sleepwear history. The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s brought mass manufacturing to the American bedroom, and with it, a democratization of sleepwear: cotton pajamas, baby-doll nightgowns, and flannel sets became widely available and widely purchased. Fabric innovation — nylon, polyester — promised easy care and low cost, even if the sensory experience was a step backward from natural fibers (Textile Exchange, 2022).
By the late 1980s, sleepwear had become something of an afterthought in mainstream fashion — comfortable enough, perhaps, but rarely designed with genuine intention or care for how a woman actually experienced wearing it. Much of what was marketed to women was designed more for visual appeal — packaging an idea of femininity — than for the way a garment glides over skin at 2 a.m. (Journal of Natural Fibers, 2021).
This is the gap into which Eberjey was founded.
How Did Women's Sleepwear Change in the 1990s?
By the mid-1990s, women's relationship with their own comfort had begun to shift in quieter, deeper ways. Wellness culture was emerging, and yet the sleepwear market had not caught up. The options were, broadly, lingerie designed for someone else's gaze or purely utilitarian basics with little beauty or intentionality.
In 1996, Ali Mejia and Mariela Rovito founded Eberjey in Miami with a specific conviction: that women deserved sleepwear designed for them — for how their bodies move, for how fabric feels against skin, for the quiet hours of the morning that belong entirely to the self. The name itself comes from a Nigerian word for joy. That founding philosophy — comfort and confidence as inseparable, sleepwear as self-care rather than performance — was, in retrospect, exactly continuous with the long arc of pajama history. From pae jama to Chanel's Riviera trousers to the modern luxury PJ set, the through-line has always been a woman's right to feel at ease in her own body.
What Role Did Fabric Innovation Play in the Sleepwear Revolution?
The modern luxury sleepwear renaissance is inseparable from material science. TENCEL™ Modal — the fabric at the heart of Eberjey's bestselling Gisele PJ Set — is a next-generation fiber produced by Lenzing AG from sustainably sourced beechwood pulp using a closed-loop process that recovers more than 99% of the solvents used in production (Lenzing AG, 2023). The result is a fiber that is exceptionally buttery-soft, breathable, and temperature-regulating — qualities that matter enormously for sleep quality.
Thermal comfort during sleep has a measurable impact on sleep onset and quality (Sleep Foundation, 2023). Fabrics that wick moisture and regulate temperature — natural fibers like Modal, silk, and high-quality cotton — support the body's natural drop in core temperature that initiates sleep. This is not a marketing claim; it is physiology. The most considered sleepwear is not simply the most beautiful — it is the most responsive to how the body actually works at rest.
TENCEL™ Modal also carries OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certification, meaning every component has been tested and confirmed free from harmful substances (OEKO-TEX, 2023). For a garment worn as a second skin for eight or more hours a night, this is a meaningful assurance — and part of a broader movement in the textile industry toward transparency and responsibility (Textile Exchange, 2022).
How Did the Pandemic Change How We Think About Sleepwear and Loungewear?
If any recent event accelerated the cultural evolution of pajamas from private garment to lifestyle statement, it was the global pandemic of 2020. With the boundary between home and work collapsed overnight, the pajama — or the pajama-adjacent loungewear set — became something millions of people wore not just to sleep but to work, to socialize over video call, to move through the entirety of a day (Forbes, 2021).
This was not a temporary adaptation. In the years following, consumers permanently reprioritized comfort in their wardrobes, and the sleepwear and loungewear category grew substantially as a result (Forbes, 2021). The pandemic did something the fashion industry had been gesturing toward for decades: it made comfort not a concession but an aspiration.
The shift confirmed what the history of pajamas had always suggested. From the pae jama of the Mughal court to Chanel's silk beach trousers to the Gisele PJ Set worn by a woman settling into a Sunday morning with coffee and nowhere to be — the pajama has never been simply about sleep. It has always been about the freedom to feel yourself, fully, in the private hours that belong to you alone. That is a history worth wearing.
What the history of pajamas reveals, above all, is that the softer side of life has always been worth choosing. The pae jama of ancient Persia, the silk sets of Hollywood's golden age, the buttery-soft Modal of today's most enduring sleepwear — each moment was a woman deciding that how she feels inside her own home matters as much as how she appears anywhere else. The right pajama is not merely something you put on at the end of the day. It is the beginning of something — a gentle ritual, a return to yourself, a quiet declaration that this time is yours.
References & Citations
Lenzing AG. (2023). TENCEL™ Modal fiber: Sustainability and production. Retrieved from https://www.lenzing.com/products/tencel
OEKO-TEX Association. (2023). OEKO-TEX Standard 100: What it means for consumers. Retrieved from https://www.oeko-tex.com/en/our-standards/oeko-tex-standard-100
Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). Pajamas, n. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://www.oed.com
Sleep Foundation. (2023). How temperature affects sleep. Retrieved from https://www.sleepfoundation.org/bedroom-environment/temperature
Smithsonian Magazine. (2018). The surprisingly subversive history of pajamas. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com
Textile Exchange. (2022). Preferred fiber and materials market report 2022. Retrieved from https://textileexchange.org/reports
Victoria and Albert Museum. (2019). Nightwear and the history of the pajama in Britain. Retrieved from https://www.vam.ac.uk
Forbes. (2021). How the pandemic permanently changed the way we dress at home. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com
Journal of Natural Fibers. (2021). Sensory comfort properties of natural and synthetic textile materials in nightwear applications. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjnf20
