Joanne McNeill: Taking to streets in PJs

Recently I did a double-take when I saw someone in town, wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown on the street in broad daylight.

I was not hallucinating. It appears public pyjamas - once the exclusive domain of the bewildered, sick, imprisoned, outcast or terminally slothful - are a hot international fashion trend.

Of course, on a purely practical level, there's nothing wrong with pyjamas as clothing. They're comfy, warm and perfectly decent - covering far more flesh than crop-tops and shorts for instance - although hygiene considerations might still mean changing before bedtime to keep the sheets clean.

However, with clothing, as with all of the known cosmiverse, context is everything. We have become acculturated to the notion that floppy flannel is inappropriate streetwear.

It was not always so. Pyjamas were a British colonial borrowing from India, introduced to the west in the 17th century as lounging attire and reinvented as sleepwear later.

Infamously Coco Chanel - way ahead of her time - wore alfresco PJs in the 1920s, reportedly the habit is common in China in local neighbourhoods come dusk and somehow, lately, jarmies have starred in label couture collections of the planet.

However, the idea entered the zeitgeist - perhaps via the cult movie The Big Lebowski in which the leading, unemployed, slacker dude shops in his PJs, perhaps via the kids' TV show Bananas in Pyjamas or perhaps from nerd culture where pale bloggers hunch over blueish screens in coffee-stained pyjamas - clearly I was last to know.

Maybe it's polemical - a protest against the mainstream, uptight, dress-for-success rat-race to which we're all supposed to aspire. Or it might symbolise a desire to return to the womb and the nursery comforts of simpler times - baths, PJs, stories, teddies, kisses and sweet dreams ... sigh.

The practice is not universally welcomed however.

A Cardiff supermarket imposed a ban on customers wearing pyjamas in 2010, a Louisiana official proposed an ordinance banning public pyjamas in 2012 because they betoken "dwindling moral fibre in the community", a Dublin branch of the local WINZ equivalent advised clients pyjamas are not suitable attire when attending the office, Oxford University students were informed "this slovenly practice will desist forthwith" and controversy still rages in Christchurch and Gisborne.

Clearly, it's here to stay, at least while the fashion lasts.

Since the dawn of time though, across cultures, humans have enjoyed altered states of perception. "Getting out of it", using alcohol and other recreational substances and practices, is here to stay for the foreseeable, so Parliament was wise to reject the Alcohol Reform Bill last week. The youth sector is no more unruly now than it was in my day when teenagers were typically headlined as shockingly out of control, marijuana made you rape and kill, and mini-skirts, long hair, rock music and winklepicker shoes were the work of the devil.

Now some of those same teenagers have morphed with age and fear into hypocritical sanctimonious fun police. They have studied propaganda techniques under the tobacco-Nazis and now alcohol is in their sights.

It's a dangerous trend. Stop teenagers drinking or smoking weed and what do they do? Inhale butane, set themselves on fire, suffer and die.

Good plan? I think not.