dressing gowns

There are certain markers each year which tell me we are exiting late summer and coming into autumn. Purple damsons, plums, asters, golden quinces, and deep green cabbages. Birkenstock clogs, rather than sandals. And a warm dressing gown to replace the linen one which goes into hibernation.

[Cary Grant in ‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)]

I’m a cover-up-as-much-as-possible dressing gown type of girl. No fancy flounces or frills or fluffiness or anything remotely see-through for me. Cary Grant carries off this sort of thing far better than I ever could. So I have just made the cosiest, softest dressing gown using the Merchant & Mills Sunday pattern.

[barely there negligée worn by Grace Kelly in ‘Rear Window’ (1954)]

My love of sensible dressing gowns goes back to childhood. I may at some point have dreamed of wafting about like Grace Kelly in a barely-there negligée (which could be translated as ‘negligible’ in this case), but it makes me feel cold just thinking about it.

[detail of photo by Linda McCartney, Scotland, 1982]

This is no doubt because my earliest years were spent in a house built in the 1950s without central heating, something which still astonishes me. So my brother and I had thick tartan dressing gowns which were the sort which could easily have been cut out of a woollen blanket (Paul McCartney’s looks like his is about 2cm thick) with lovely tassels on twisted cords which could be unravelled and played with while listening to a story. I made sure our own children had dressing gowns because there is nothing like the gorgeousness of toddlers all wrapped up after a bath and snuggling in to read books together.

[Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller who has no intention of going to school]

So I have worn dressing gowns all my life. I like the way that there are so many different categories and activities associated with them. They can be worn when you are feeling glam or depressed, when wandering out, cup of coffee in hand, to deadhead the roses on a summer’s morning, as a sign of rebellion or protest and a refusal to get dressed, when ill or ailing, when walking down to the sea in Aldeburgh for an early swim then standing in the queue for the bakery, perhaps one of the few times it’s OK to wear your tatty old towelling robe out of the house -

[Jeff Bridges as The Dude in ‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998)]

- unless you are The Dude. It’s also not fine to receive Commissaire Maigret in the middle of the day wearing just a peignoir, usually none-too-clean, loosely tied or falling open to reveal mostly no underwear. Nevertheless, it seems to happen to him on a regular basis.

In a similar and equally lost and sad situation as so many of the women in Simenon’s, novels is the Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), a real period piece of kitchen sink realism. She is a depressed wife and mother, a ‘hapless slattern’ according to one reviewer, who has given up on life and whose threadbare dressing-gown expresses her lack of energy and loss of sexual identity. It’s a miserable film, but a revealing one.

[at home in NYC, 1958]

Much more my sort of dressing gown is the one Marilyn Monroe wears here, the type you could spend a whole Sunday in and not be accused of being a slattern. It is the garment for reading newspapers, drinking tea, painting toe nails, and watching a good Hitchcock film with a stunningly weird dressing gown.

This is the one worn by the equally stunningly weird Bruno in Strangers on a Train (1951). It is silk satin with an Art Deco pattern of planets and flying saucers, an oblique reference perhaps to smoking and cigarettes, and a particularly relevant motif, given the role of a lighter in the plot.

Or you could watch Donna Reed in an oversize white towelling robe in It’s a Wonderful Life (with a belt long enough to lasso the moon), a coded, clean-cut way of alluding to non-platonic attraction.

[‘Thunderball’, 1965]

This type of messaging is a lot less subtle with James Bond; all the actors playing him have worn dressing gowns, indicating he is ever-ready for bedroom action, just one shrug of the shoulders away from being naked.

There are many more famous dressing gown wearers such as Thomas Carlyle in his “long, hideous pink and brown dressing gown” (as his wife Jane wrote, rather cuttingly), and Noël Coward lounging in a pink silk monogrammed number or a rather louche polka dot one (“made for activities no more strenuous than arching an eyebrow, no more serious than a seduction, no more practical than mixing a cocktail”). But a favourite is the pathologically indolent fictional Oblomov who is barely able to get up off his couch, let alone change out of his халат or dressing gown.

“The costume in question consisted of a dressing-gown of some Persian material--a real Eastern dressing-gown…so roomy that Oblomov might have wrapped himself in it once or twice over…True, it was a dressing-gown which had lost its pristine freshness, and had, in places, exchanged its natural, original sheen for one acquired by hard wear; yet still it retained both the clarity of its Oriental colouring and the soundness of its texture. In Oblomov's eyes it was a garment possessed of a myriad invaluable qualities, for it was so soft and pliable that, when wearing it, the body was unaware of its presence, and, like an obedient slave, it answered even to the slightest movement.”

I want one.

[‘A New Day’ (1930) by William Henry Margetson]

Just as I would like one exactly like this for my life in a parallel universe in which my dressing gowns match my nasturtiums.

[Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima by David Hockney, 2021]

Mostly, though, I just aspire to be an comfortable in my own skin/dressing gown as JP, clearly a man incredibly at ease with himself and his choice of attire when sitting for his portrait.

[photo by Harry Benson, 1964]

And now that I have a similarly checked, comfy dressing gown, I am ready to be invited to a pillow fight, the dress code for which is obvious.

All of which makes me wonder why no-one has written a book about dressing gowns. 100 Dressing Gowns needs to go on my ‘to be written list’.

Happy Sunday!