THROUGHOUT much of the world, pyjamas are generally the business of, and seen by, yourself and your loved ones alone. But not in Shanghai.
Any time of the day or night, at virtually any time of the year, a casual stroll through the streets of the eastern Chinese city will give the tourist a visual tour of the best nightwear China has to offer.
Old couples with matching silk pyjamas, ladies keeping out the cold in huge padded pyjamas, kids in cotton jim-jams with dancing teddy bears and the traditionalists in candy-stripe hospital variants.
“It’s a Shanghainese phenomenon. In Beijing you’ll see people wandering around with their shirts rolled up but here people think it’s perfectly normal to wear pyjamas,” said Li Yan, fashion editor of popular city magazine Weekend.
And in Shanghai, pyjamas are not something you wear to the shop as you dash out to pick up a bottle of milk, they are a fashion statement.
“People don’t just wear any old pyjamas when they go out, they wear a nicer pair,” said Ms. Li.
The key to Shanghai’s love affair with Western nightwear has a lot to do with the city’s origins as a Western treaty port and its history of brash commercialism.
Even today, Shanghai remains China’s economic centre, the biggest port and the site of its stock market — and, if you listen to residents, the city with the best sense of style.
The predilection for wandering around in one’s nightwear draws on all these factors.
“In the old days, many people didn’t have much money so when they sat out on the streets at night or went to sleep, they wore their most tattered old clothes. Wearing pyjamas was a sign that you had money,” said He Zili, originally from south China’s Guangzhou and a keen observer of his adopted city’s habits.
Shanghai’s lane-style houses were built as tenements at the turn of the century for the workers in the city’s hoard of factories.
The narrow dwellings were damp, cramped and in summer, stiflingly hot.
Consequently in the warmer months, people would drag their bedding outside and sleep in the street, giving them ample opportunity to inspect one another’s nightwear, and a love affair was born.
In the 1990s, officials worried about it. They put up signs and ran education campaigns to tell people that they shouldn’t walk about in their nightgowns, but eventually someone in a government office wrung their hands in despair and gave up.
The public education campaigns ran just long enough to make a small dent in the city’s psyche but not long enough for people to change their habits. As with spitting, it’s a habit most people won’t give up.
Shanghai has run campaigns to stop people walking their dogs outside and to prevent them from hanging their washing to dry outside in a bid to polish the city’s image as an international metropolis, but neither of those is having much effect either.
“I know it’s not very cultured or elegant, but it’s convenient. I don’t usually do it. I’m just waiting for my daughter to get home
on the bus,” said one middle-aged woman who refused to give her name.
Li Yan thinks the trend will die out as the old houses are knocked down and the last glimpses of Shanghai’s history disappear from the city’s skyline.
“Shanghai is getting more and more developed. Wearing pyjamas is not the right thing for an international city. It doesn’t look good,” she said.
As the old “Shikumen” stone-gated tenements are knocked down to build skyscrapers and people move into modern flats, life will move off the streets and so will pyjamas, she predicts.
People who lived in tenement houses changed into their pyjamas on returning home, and would not think they needed a change of clothes when they went out into the street.
“A lot of people didn’t have bathrooms, and the houses were poor, but now people have moved into two-bedroom flats with their own bathrooms so there’s no reason to do it,” she said. – AFP