Borzoi White Mohair with zipper (box for pajamas), glass eyes
It’s so weird that pyjama cases were a thing. They went so abruptly out of fashion, too. The idea was (I think) that it was vaguely indecent to leave your pajamas around, and it definitely spoils the look of your nicely made bed, so lots of people put them under the pillow; but a cuter thing to do was to have a specially made empty stuffed animal or cute purse or pillow thing, with a zipper, and you’d stuff it with your pajamas in the morning and place it cutely on your nicely made bed. Then in the evening, you would unzip and disembowel the soft plump object, and reclaim the pajamas. It wasn’t just a thing for kids; adults did it too. In the kind of pre-1950s novels I like to pick up, authors describe a character’s pyjama case to reveal a bit about the character; but of course they never say why you’d have a pyjama case. “Everyone knows what a horse is.”
I suppose it’s been culturally decided that it’s an unnecessary step in the bedtime process. We’re busy bastards, aren’t we? Who makes their bed every morning, I mean, really?
Perhaps, also, our clothing is no longer of the material and methodology where you have to spend extra time/attention/tools on them. Pyjama cases may have had some benefit - extending the life of the pyjamas, or something. Perhaps it was more common in those days for mice to climb into your silk pyjamas, or they kept them from being attacked by dogs, or something. It’s possible that there are unspoken benefits to keeping your pyjamas in a stuffed toy, which previous generations knew instinctively and we have forgotten. Some people are like that, they maintain rituals and practices that don’t get written down, and so become arcana. My father-in-law owns special clothing maintenance tools such as shoe trees (which you place in your shoes every night at night) and trouser presses (in which you leave your worn-but-not-dirty trousers overnight so they are crisp in the morning). He irons his pocket handkerchiefs - why? so that they fold into a precise pocket shape, with the same fold pattern as plastic-wrapped disposable tissues: the optimised shape for pockets. You are not going to read in the literature about there being a reason for ironing pocket handkerchiefs. It is a habit that is not captured by history. You have to speak to a practitioner to even consider that there is a specific value in pocket handkerchief folding. Maybe we operate at a remove from the people who could have told us why they bothered with the idea and then stopped.
You can buy a selection of pyjama cases online, but with no explanation of why you’d want to, it’s hard to see how this helps. The only real thing i can see is that it’s cute and tidies the pyjamas up, but we’ve all decided that untidy pyjamas are a problem that doesn’t need solving.
Pyjama cases have no Wikipedia article; search engines have nothing to offer. Old books only self-reference them being a normal thing. Someone who knows about pyjama cases or textile history could heroically fill this in. Please do. Otherwise, this tumblr post is going to suddenly become the leading analysis of pyjama cases, and that would be sad.
Ooh ooh OK I actually know how this started!! I’m obsessed with looking into obscure fashion trivia and there was this trend in the early 20th century to keep your stuff protrcted and also to show off your wealth and skills as a classy lady by (usually making by hand) something called a nightgown case or nightdress case (also known as a lingerie bag, linen bag, lingerie case, hose bag, etc). Below is an example currently on ebay for a nightgown bag but it’s basically this.
You would fold your garmets inside the bag. These were mostly made by hand to show off your embroidery and sewing skills but you could purchase them too if you had oodles of money to flaunt. Additional fun fact: they also made handkerchief bags for a similar reason.
These, however, were fancy and often filigree’d cases that was meant to hold your nightgown (and if you’re really into it your secret lingerie) and show off how exquisite and fancy it was without showing the actual garment because that was a bit scandalous and also incredibly hard to replace easily. The bags could be simple cloth or lined with silk.
The whole point was that clothes were a comodity- you couldn’t just go out and buy 10 different fancy nightgowns. This was going on in the 1910s ok, the thought of buying mass prodiced garments was unheard of so you needed a way to keep your expensive or fancy clothes pristine and nice. It was also an Era of hand mending a lot of things so the longer you could keep your stuff as neat as possible the better.
Here is one made by a machine:
These cases were trendy enough to be personally monogrammed and embroidered too and I don’t have proof of it but I think what happened was that children are messy and clumsy at keeping their stuff neat, but an embroidery bag is 100% boring to a kid. So what’s the easiest solution? Make a cute stuffed animal you can put your clothes in to keep them tidy! Children are way more likely to fold up their clothes into a stuffed animal than a fancy embroidered bag. And the toy bags were made much the same- usually with a silky interior to protect the clothes.
I believe the reason we don’t have a wiki page on the plush pajama cases is because we often neglect children in terms of historical documentation! We have plenty of information about nightgown cases because adults took care of them and wrote about them. And because it was so easy for an adult to be like “ah yes the children have the kid version of this fancy adult thing” they didn’t bother to write down why it was made and why it was used!
Like many redundant items though, the cases fell out of fashion because they weren’t necessary any more. As clothes became more accessible and more easily replaceable, the need to keep them safe and pristine went away and so the need for protective bags for clothes or handkerchiefs etc. was lost.
I have a handkerchief case that I keep the hankies I am not currently using in, and it lives inside my “found it for ten dollars at the thrift shop and still need to strip the rest of the 60’s era hospital green paint off it to reveal the multiple wood inlay of the exterior” Lane waterfall-style chest. I got it from my best friend’s mom while helping them get her house emptied out to move across the country, and she gave me a lot of things she had collected that never sold at the flea market.
Other items include what seemed to be an odd bag that I now, thanks to this post, know must be a nightgown bag very similar to the eBay one shown above, one that is larger and helpfully is embroidered that it is for laundry, and one that has artful embroidery on several small pouch sections that make it quite clear that it is meant to hold a brush, a comb, and several other objects.
