When pink pajamas go public

By Sean Carey

One day last January, around 7:00 in the evening, I was coming out of Sainsbury’s in St. Albans (near a car wash described in a previous post), laden with bags of shopping. I saw a white woman in her mid-30s, getting out of her smart sports car at the supermarket’s filling station.

Why did I notice her? Despite the winter cold and gloom, she was wearing bright pink pajamas and color-matching furry slippers.

By coincidence, I recognized her as a receptionist at my local branch of HSBC, “the world’s local bank” as it says in the ads. But I had never seen her, or anyone wearing this sort of clothing in a public place before.

As a never-off-duty cultural anthropologist I was very keen to see how the cashiers in the filling station would react to the unusually attired customer. I decided that it was an opportune time to engage in some participant observation by driving my car to the forecourt and putting some fuel in the tank.

My timing was impeccable. I followed the pajama-clad HSBC employee into the filling station’s check out and stood behind her in the queue. When it was her turn to pay, the transaction went smoothly enough.

Despite their obvious curiosity, neither of the two cashiers seated behind the counter was bold enough to ask the woman why she was dressed the way she was. I did notice a twinkle of amusement, however, in the eyes of the female cashier when she caught the gaze of her male colleague. He smiled back at her. I found myself smiling as well.

At the time, I thought that going out in public while dressed in pink pajamas and furry slippers was idiosyncratic. I discovered a few weeks later that such attire is a fad in at least one other part of the U.K., where the country’s largest supermarket group, Tesco, decided that it would try and eliminate it before it became a long-term trend.

Despite the financial penalty to the company, Tesco refused to serve customers dressed in pajamas or walking barefoot in its store in St. Mellons in Cardiff, Wales. Signs placed at the entrance of the supermarket read:

To avoid causing offence or embarrassment to others we ask that our customers are appropriately dressed when visiting our store (footwear must be worn at all times and no nightwear is permitted).

“We’re not a nightclub with a strict dress code, and jeans and trainers are of course more than welcome,” a Tesco representative told reporters. “We do, however, request that customers do not shop in their PJs or nightgowns.”

Here is an anthropology connection, from more than half a century ago, to understanding pajamas-in-public.

“Ever since the middle of the 18th century, the scope and rigour of formality has been on the decline, modes of dress and of address have become increasingly casual, precedence and protocol increasingly irrelevant,” wrote British anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach in an essay for New Society in 1965. He was commenting on the deep social and cultural changes that had taken hold in most of Western Europe, the U.S., and “newly westernised” countries like Japan.
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Row over corn rows hairstyle

By contributor Sean Carey

An 11 year-old African-Caribbean boy was refused entry to a Roman Catholic secondary school in North London in 2009 because he was wearing ‘corn rows’ (braided hair close to the scalp). Two years later, he has won a significant victory in the High Court.

Cornrow mohawk. Flickr/J Daniel Gonzalez.

The decision by St. Gregory’s Catholic Science College in Harrow to exclude him was ostensibly based on two reasons.

His hair style contravened the school dress code. Boys are obliged to wear their hair in a military-style “short back and sides.”
His hair style might encourage separatism, and possibly a “gang culture,” within the institution.

The judge ruled that the school’s decision was “unlawful” and encouraged “indirect discrimination” by not taking into account an individual’s cultural background and heritage.

“There are a number of Afro-Caribbeans for whom cutting their hair and wearing it in corn rows is a matter of their cultural background,” he said, “and can work against them on the basis of their ethnicity.”

Sewing in the braids. Flickr/Samantha Steele

The case is unusual in the U.K., although exceptions have been made in the case of male Sikhs. Because of their religious tradition of wearing turbans, they are exempt from wearing crash helmets while riding motorcycles and scooters.

But the new ruling on corn rows was based on secular customary behaviour — in this instance, family and a wider cultural tradition amongst some African-Caribbeans (and Black Africans).

A spokesperson for St. Gregory’s said that it is “naturally disappointed” (press release PDF) with the ruling and is considering taking the case to the Court of Appeal.

The politics of women’s clothing

By Barbara Miller

The Economist reports that Sudan’s criminal law forbids “indecent clothing in public” with little in the way of further details. Sudanese journalist Lubna al-Hussein was recently arrested in Sudan along with 12 women for being improperly dressed. Ten of the 12 accepted the charge, and each was punished with 10 lashes and was forced to pay a fine equal to U.S. $100. Ms. Hussein is contesting the charges. The problem seems to be that she was wearing trousers.

In Sudan women are flogged for wearing pants. In France, women appearing in public fully covered with a head-to-toe veil has become a volatile policy question for the government and an important cultural rights issue for Muslims along with the 2004 ban against girls wearing headscarves in schools. France has the largest Muslim population of any country in Europe. Muslims constitute about 10 percent of the national population.

How does all this square with liberté, egalité, and fraternité? Are such hard-fought-for values to be lost in the wake of contemporary concerns for “national integration” and “national security”? And how important a role, behind the veil of national policy, is being played by xenophobia and anti-immigrationist fears?

Image: Female students in Alexandria, Egypt. By Barbara Miller.