Seven Things To Wear To Sleep

By Request: Pajamas!

We’re all thinking about hibernating right now, right? It’s getting light later and later in the morning and it feels right to be spending more time in bed.

I love thinking about sleepwear because it has such a specific and different purpose from most of my clothes. It’s clothing that is really just for me—only my most intimate acquaintances will ever see it and I mostly wear pajamas to be warm and cozy before drifting off to sleep. It’s what we wear at our most vulnerable, during the part of the day where we are unconscious.

I think for me the nostalgic sleepwear holy grail is the Hanna Andersson long john pajamas (up to a size 20). They no longer fit me, but they seem like the perfect pajama—a soft ribbed cotton knit, endearing stripes, not too loose and not too tight.

Over the years, I’ve found that I don’t love some of the most popular pajama recommendations du jour—Printfresh and these Target pajamas. Printfresh PJs have sooo many good things going for them—colorful prints, organic cotton, big size range—but I find the fabric so uncomfortable for sleeping! It gets wrinkly in a way I find unpleasant and it doesn’t have enough give so they get tangled up when I’m rolling around. And the oft-recommended Target PJ set just didn’t hold up for me! Like a lot of things from Target maybe, the fabric got weird after just one wash and the collar never sat right again.

What do you wearing to bed?

If you have an outfit or clothes query you’d like me to address in a future edition of Big Undies, submit it for consideration here.

Here are six sleepwear options I can recommend: