Walk into a department store today and look at the men's sleepwear section. You will find two things.
A small corner of traditional pyjamas. Striped cotton. Piped edges. Collar. Chest pocket. The kind of thing your grandfather wore. Today these feel more like a costume. Put one on and you half expect a butler to bring you an evening brandy.
And another section of graphic-print loungewear, and novelty gift pyjamas with pizza slices printed on them.
There is not much in between. No category of men's sleepwear that actually reflects how men live, sleep, and think about themselves in 2026. This is strange, because pyjamas have not always been a sartorial dead zone. There was a period when what a man wore to bed was genuinely considered, even stylish. How did we get here? And why does it matter?
THE PERSIAN ORIGIN
The word pyjama comes from the Persian pae-jameh, meaning "leg garment." In its original form, it was a loose drawstring trouser worn by men and women across India, Iran, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, usually paired with a knee-length tunic. The garment is old. There is evidence of it dating back to the Gupta period in India, between the 4th and 5th centuries.
British colonial officers stationed in India in the 17th and 18th centuries encountered pyjamas and quickly appreciated their practicality. The loose cut, the drawstring, the light cotton, all of it made more sense for tropical heat than the heavy woollens they had brought from home. The East India Company called them "mogul's breeches" and began wearing them as leisure wear around the house.
By the 1870s, returning officers were bringing pyjamas back to Britain. Initially, they were worn only in private, a quiet badge of colonial experience. The working-class man still wore a nightshirt. The middle-class gent still wore a nightshirt. Pyjamas were for men who had been to India.
THE GOLDEN AGE
The early 20th century changed everything. Pyjamas moved from curiosity to standard issue.
By the 1910s, tailors on Savile Row were offering bespoke pyjama sets to their regular suit wearing customers. The cut was deliberate: a shirt-like top with a collar, a chest pocket, contrasting piping along the edges, and trousers in matching fabric. Fabrics ran from soft flannel for winter to woven cotton and silk for summer. The design language was simple. Pyjamas should look like a man had given them thought.
Through the 1920s and 30s, pyjamas became a statement piece. Hollywood picked them up. James Stewart wore four different pyjama sets across the 1954 Hitchcock thriller Rear Window. Cary Grant wore them. Fred Astaire wore them. They appeared in magazines, advertisements, and films as a marker of masculine refinement. The 1929 Vogue summer issue ran a cover featuring beach pyjamas, which tells you something about how far the category had travelled from its Persian origins.
This was the peak. If you were a man with any care for how you presented, you owned pyjamas. The collar, the chest pocket, the piping all became the standard specification for a garment you put on every night.
THE COLLAPSE
Then came the 1960s and 1970s.
Attitudes shifted. Central heating became standard in Western homes, which meant the thermal case for pyjamas weakened. You no longer needed a full flannel set to survive a British winter in bed. A t-shirt and your underwear would do.
The counterculture of the 1960s worked against formality in every direction, including sleepwear. Why wear pyjamas with a collar when you could wear nothing at all? The 1970s leaned further into this. Sales of traditional pyjama sets declined sharply across the UK and US. Men shifted to sleep shorts, old t-shirts, or nothing.
One Vintage Fashion Guild analysis puts it crisply: in the 1960s the front-button pyjama set was still standard, but the 1970s saw the category collapse into "sleep shorts, pants, underwear, or simply nothing at all for bed wear." The industry never really recovered its cultural position.
The pyjamas that survived the transition did so by doubling down on what had become their stereotype: stripes, piping, collars, chest pockets. The exact features that made them feel considered in 1925 made them feel old-fashioned by 1985. Today, those same features still make them feel like costume.
WHAT MEN ACTUALLY WEAR NOW
This is where the data gets interesting, and unreliable.
Surveys on what men wear to bed produce wildly different numbers depending on who is asking and how. A 2012 US survey by Anna's Linens (3,700 respondents) found only 8% of Americans slept naked. A 2024 global survey aggregation reported 61% of British men sleep nude. A US mattress company survey found 60% of men claimed they slept naked. A Saatva couples survey reported 20% of people always sleep nude, with men more likely than women.
The variance does not seem to be a rounding error. It is the gap between what men say and what they do.
There are two honest ways to read the data. The first is that sleep habits genuinely vary by country, climate, and generation. The second is that men overstate how often they sleep naked because it sounds more masculine, more rugged, more free. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Here is what we can say with confidence. A meaningful proportion of men report sleeping naked, but a much larger proportion sleep in whatever is lying closest. A worn t-shirt. The day old boxers. The bottoms of an old tracksuit. No consideration, just whatever came to hand at the end of the day.
The traditional pyjama set, meanwhile, has become a niche product for a small demographic. Older men who have always worn them. Gift recipients at Christmas. A slice of the premium market served by Derek Rose and a handful of others. The category's cultural centre of gravity collapsed fifty years ago and has not returned.
THE COSPLAY PROBLEM
Here is why the traditional pyjama set struggles to come back, even for men who might otherwise be interested.
Put on a striped cotton set with a collar, chest pocket, and piping in 2026, and something does not sit right. It reads as a costume from a different era, as if you are dressing up to play a character. Landed gentry in a country house. A Wes Anderson set dressing.
The features themselves are not the problem. A collar makes sense for a buttoned top. A chest pocket is practical. Piping looks clean. But assembled together, on short-staple cotton with stripes, they signal a specific aesthetic that most modern men do not want to sign up to. It is the sleepwear equivalent of a suit.
This is the trap that premium sleepwear brands keep falling into. They try to rescue the category by returning to its golden-age codes. Stripes, collars, pockets, piping. The overall aesthetic keeps pulling backwards toward 1935.
What is missing is a sleepwear product that reflects how modern men actually dress and think about their bodies. Clean lines. Performance fabric. Fit that works for a man who lifts, runs, or cycles. No unnecessary pockets. No costume.
That is the space we built unsuited to fill. The Equinox collection uses SERIS™, our rare micro modal air fabric, designed for men who think about sleep the way they think about training. No cosplay, just sleepwear engineered for men in 2026 who take recovery seriously.
WHY THIS HISTORY MATTERS
The easy conclusion is that pyjamas had their moment and lost it. That modern men have moved on, and that is fine.
The harder conclusion is that the category never really recovered because nobody rebuilt it. The 20th century peak of men's sleepwear was built around specific cultural signals: leisure, refinement, taste. When those signals stopped resonating, the industry had no plan B. It kept producing the same product for a shrinking audience and ceded the rest of the market to old t-shirts and day old boxers.
Meanwhile, the physiology did not change. Men still need to drop their core body temperature by 1°C to fall asleep. They still sweat at night. They still spend a third of their lives asleep. The case for proper sleepwear was never about stripes and piping. It was always about what fabric does for sleep.
That case is stronger now than it has ever been. Men track their recovery on WHOOP. They read Walker and listen to Huberman. They invest in expensive mattresses and bedding systems.
The sleepwear category needs a reset. Performance fabric. Modern cut. Built for the men in 2026, not the men in the Vogue advertisements of 1929.
For more on the fabric that makes this possible, see our guide Which Fabric Actually Works For Hot Sleepers. For the full framework on modern sleepwear, see The Man's Guide To Sleepwear Fabric.
COMMON QUESTIONS
WHEN DID PYJAMAS BECOME POPULAR FOR MEN?
Pyjamas were adopted by British colonial officers in India during the 17th and 18th centuries, then brought back to Britain in the 1870s. They replaced the nightshirt as standard male sleepwear in Britain and the US through the early 20th century, reaching peak cultural status in the 1920s through 1940s, a period often referred to as the golden age of pyjama design.
WHY DID PYJAMAS GO OUT OF FASHION?
Traditional pyjamas declined sharply through the 1960s and 1970s. Three factors drove the shift: central heating reduced the thermal need for full sleepwear, the counterculture rejected formality in all domains including sleepwear, and men shifted to t-shirts, sleep shorts, or nothing at all. The industry failed to modernise and kept producing the same design language that had worked in 1935.
WHAT PERCENTAGE OF MEN SLEEP NAKED?
Surveys produce wildly different numbers. US surveys have reported figures as low as 8% and as high as 60%. UK and European surveys tend to report higher rates than US ones. The variance likely reflects a mix of genuine cultural difference and self-reporting bias, since men may overstate how often they sleep naked. The more reliable takeaway is that a meaningful proportion of men sleep naked some of the time, but the majority still wear something to bed, often by default rather than design.
WHY DO TRADITIONAL PYJAMAS LOOK OLD-FASHIONED?
The design language of traditional pyjamas (stripes, collar, chest pocket, piping) was developed for early 20th century tailoring and has not evolved since. The features are not inherently bad, but they signal a specific period aesthetic that reads as costume in a modern context. Most premium sleepwear brands still use this design vocabulary, which keeps the category anchored to its 1930s peak rather than responding to how men dress and live today.
IS IT BETTER TO SLEEP NAKED OR IN PYJAMAS?
From a physiology standpoint, what matters is the fabric against your skin, whether that is sleepwear or bedding. A man who sleeps naked on cotton sheets is still in contact with cotton for eight hours. A man who wears modern performance sleepwear will have better thermal and moisture management than naked-on-cotton provides. The decision is less about clothing vs nakedness and more about which fabrics are touching your skin through the night.
