Sponsored by
Jayne Dawson: Dressing down at the supermarket
I'm not even going to ask what you wear to sleep in because sometimes less is quite enough when it comes to personal information. But how about shopping?
What do you wear to shop in?
Me, I favour rags. Honestly, I do. Anything that's old, baggy saggy and comfortable shrieks "ideal shopping wear" to me.
It's the invisible woman look – the more I blend in with the beans, the more at ease I am. Well, not literally, I don't wear orange or Heinz turquoise or anything, but you know what I mean.
This extends to clothes shopping too. I mean who wants to clothes-shop looking their best? That way, should you be forced to look at yourself in a changing room mirror and that mirror tells a sad tale, you have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
That mirror is telling you that you have done your best, you have made the effort and still fallen short. Much better to be there with no make-up and unwashed hair and then there is, in theory, room for improvement. I think a lot of women adopt this strategy. There is a level below shopping in your baggies and saggies though, and that's where the sleepwear comes in – because an emerging trend right now is, apparently, shopping in your pyjamas.
This I could never do. Heck, I still have that nightmare where you discover you are walking down the street in your vest, so nightwear as shopping wear is never going to be an option for me.
Okay, I admit to having gone to the garage in my nightie with a coat on top but that was a quick raid on the chocolate shelf and out again. There was no hanging around.
Some people do apparently shop in their jim-jams though, to such an extent that one branch of Tesco has ensured the company a lot of publicity by banning the practice.
I can see why people might wander the aisles in pyjamas. Sort of. After all, we are very much encouraged to see supermarkets as places that love us and look after us, so why not turn up in our cosy clothes, all ready for a big retail hug?
Vulnerable
If supermarkets will offer dating nights and friendly greeters and flu jabs and chats with a pharmacist and the like, then maybe they shouldn't be surprised when we give them our most vulnerable selves.
Then again, maybe those pyjama-clad customers are taking their inspiration from a Tesco advert featuring Martin Clunes shlepping around the aisles in his PJs.
But in real life, customers have complained, say Tesco, and really I'm not surprised. Don't we have nightwear and daywear for a reason. Isn't, er, cleanliness involved?
A clean, crisp pair of pyjamas straight from the tumble dryer, fair enough; maybe even your best freshly-ironed wincyette nightie
and your post-Christmas, still-fluffy slippers.
But who wants to contemplate the soup selection next to a person who is wearing the more likely option – things they have slept in all night. That's just yuk.
At heart, what these people are not getting is that clothes really are a sort of armour, aren't they? The right clothes make us feel safe and protected.
In the office that means we wear stuff like suits and tailored skirts and jackets. This is work armour.
Work armour actually used to be better than it is today. In the 1980s women all wore jackets so wide and pointy that they were impregnable. Nobody could get them. Really, it was a difficult moment when cardigans became the thing to wear instead.
Men wore the sharpest suits they could afford with a shirt and tie, always a tie. Now, the male equivalent of the office cardigan is the no-tie look. I don't like it. Ties are pointless things, but then so are most of the garments we wear, so that's no argument. Ties are the right thing to wear if you are a man and you work in an office. They are your armour. As for Dress Down Friday, forget it. Smart-casual at work never protected anyone.
So what those people shopping in their nightwear need to understand is that they are not properly armoured. The supermarket is not their friend, they are not popping round to their auntie's, they are not attending a sleepover, they are merely going out to spend money, quite probably on things they don't need.
They need to be wearing their baggy, saggy stuff, not their pyjamas.That way they will be safe, ready for anything the supermarket can throw at them, but they won't be making the rest of us feel a bit queasy.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 10 C to 25 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: East
