Take back the nightie

What to wear in bed on a hot summer’s night? The obvious answer is “nothing at all”. But sometimes propriety – or a strong-held belief that you’re one of the lost Bennet sisters of Longbourn – demands a pretty, whisper-light nightgown, surely?

Maybe not. Romantic nightdresses are divisive. You either delight in them or you are violently opposed. My sister turns green at the thought of bedtime frills and pin-tucks; my teenage daughter calls me Wee Willie Winkie – or worse, Scrooge – when she catches me floating down the stairs in mine, demanding the whereabouts of my lantern.

But, nightie haters, be warned. The romantically afflicted are in peak season – it’s midsummer, the temperature is right, the latest series of Bridgerton is still fresh in the mind and a new nightdress collaboration between two nostalgic British brands is in the offing.

“A floaty nightdress evokes that idea of a perfect English high summer,” says Emily Campbell of If Only If, the nightwear brand she took over from her mother and rebranded in 2020. Its nightdresses in sheer cotton voile and cambric with drooping frills and milkmaid necklines are more sensuous than sensible. “All our designs are rooted in memories and nostalgia and romance – something that’s never going to go out of fashion because it just makes women feel beautiful.”

Our customers put slips under the nightwear and wear them outside of bed

On 2 July, If Only If launches its new collection made in collaboration with Cabbages & Roses, the furnishing and clothing brand beloved, since its founding in 2000 by the late Christina Strutt, for its faded country cottage aesthetic. The three-piece capsule of two adult and a children’s nightdress in vintage-inspired floral prints is the perfect attire for wistful dawn cuppas and the barefoot sniffing of roses. “Those worn-in effect prints are beautiful and so intrinsic to that feeling of lightness and floatiness that you want on a hot summer’s night,” says Campbell. 

The Christina, named after Strutt, is a print of pink rose bouquets on organic cotton voile; the Violet, named for Violet Dent, now the creative director of Cabbages & Roses, is a day-to-night design – a rose sprig print on a bio-based modal fabric. “We made it into more of a Cabbages shape,” says Dent. “A very A-line cut with extra fabric for more swing, and we kept the smocking, which Emily does to perfection.”

Dent remembers Strutt’s own prized nightie collection. “She had a whole section of her wardrobe devoted to them, hung in a line. I remember her saying that she wished everything in her wardrobe was a white nightdress because it just looked so good.” 

If Only If is one of a number of small British brands bringing olde-world romance into sleepwear. The London-based label Faune, which began with children’s nightwear and moved into adult styles in 2020, is inspired by lacey French cotton nightwear that designer Nicola Niblett used to find at Porte de Clignancourt flea market in Paris when she worked in the city in the 2000s. “We use cotton, vintage lace, pin tucks in our designs – all of those things we initially fell in love with,” she says. Costumes from films such as Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Big Sleep and The Virgin Suicides consistently feature as inspiration on her moodboards.

Popular styles for high summer wear include the sleeveless Gardenia with lace inserts, the cornflower-print Vivienne, and the bestseller, Camelia, with schiffli cotton lace frill sleeves that drape wing-like at the back. “Some of the designs have evolved into day dresses,” says Niblett, who has also recently added a line of blouses and camisoles. “And a lot of our customers put slips under the nightwear and wear them outside of bed.” (If Only If has recently started selling a nude slip from their collection for exactly this purpose.)

Olivia Morris, the footwear designer and former design director at Lulu Guinness, who has moved into vintage-inspired homeware and accessories with her label, Olivia Morris At Home, is a self-confessed “nightie obsessive”, a habit that began when she was a teenager and came across a Victorian nightdress at a vintage shop in Galway, Ireland. While Morris doesn’t make nightdresses herself (“I think other people do them very well”), she was drawn to the idea of accessorising nightwear to make it wearable all day. Her slippers and robes are meant to complement and complete a romantic, old-fashioned aesthetic founded around a pretty nightdress or slip. The robes, handmade in Sussex, are cut from ticking, deadstock 1960s and ’70s embroidered table linens and chintzy fabrics. “They’re all unused linens so they’re beautifully crisp,” she says.

Other resources for the lightly dressed sleeper include Cologne & Cotton, which has five stores in the UK, and has been a somewhat under-the-radar source for pretty cotton nightdresses for more than 30 years. Desmond & Dempsey, well known for its printed pyjama sets, is also dabbling now in nightdress styles, its most romantic design yet being this season’s Floataway Nightie, an organic cotton, three-tiered minidress in a china blue flower print with wide frilled sleeves. Wearing it is described on the brand’s website as “feeling as though you are going commando.” Which, as touched on in the beginning, is always going to be the most romantic sleepwear style of all.