Chronicle Books Blog

A few short years ago, you might have seen me walking the streets of Shanghai, camera in hand, chatting up people in their pajamas, trying to convince them to stand for a portrait. By that time, I’d watched this phenomena slowly fade over the ten years I’d visited the city, and I wanted to record it before it faded forever.

Well, my friends, little did I know the end would come so soon… it’s officially the end of an era. Sadly, pajamas in the Shanghai streets are gone…

The back-story is, with the World Expo opening in May of 2010, the local government has declared war on the strange, but rather endearing, pajama wearing sartorial habits of the Shanghainese. They organized local communities to form teams that would patrol their neighborhoods to stop anyone wearing their pjs in public and give them a lesson in “proper” dressing etiquette, or rather, they got sent back home and asked to get changed into Western clothes! All of this because the local Shanghai government believes that wearing pajamas in public makes Shanghai, and China, look “backwards.”

Unfortunately, this rule must have been written up by someone who has never left China. If that person bothered to ask foreigners what they thought, they’d hear most say how jealous they are that this culture doesn’t exist in the West.

The fact is, most people wearing their pjs outside in China look very elegant, and, moreover, if you look back 100 years at the Qing dynasty, what most people were wearing looked remarkably like… you guessed it, pajamas! Soft baggie cotton or silk tunics or even tops and bottoms, mandarin collar… a la Shanghai Tang, the Hong Kong fashion brand that keeps many of these styles alive today.

I spoke with a famous Chinese fashion designer when I created the book Planet Shanghai, and he was quick to agree that Chinese wearing pajamas in the streets look more Chinese than those wearing Western clothes.

So the pj culture is gone in Shanghai, possibly never to return, and Shanghai has moved one step closer to looking like every other major city in the world. In the process, it has lost a really unique and fun slice of culture which put a badly needed face on China, which the West primarily knows only for cheap labor, cheap manufacturing, pollution, and, recently, being their creditor.

Luckily, you can still buy the book. And if you’re not into photography, you can buy it for the intro written by John Krich–it’s one of the best short pieces of non-fiction I’ve ever read about Shanghai.

Signing off (literally in my pajamas from Taiwan),
Justin Guariglia

You can see more of Justin’s work on his website, or follow him on his Facebook fan page. Note: Alt spelling for pajama is pyjama.

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