Sometimes, a story will tell us a character “looked like they had slept in their clothes”, as opposed to pajamas, nightshirt, nightgown, or other proper sleepwear. This bugs me, because when I sleep in my daytime pants and shirt, they don’t look ‘slept-in’ – that I can tell.
So, what’s the deal? I can think of several possibilities:
The signs really are there, and I just can’t see them. In this case, what are the signs that I’m missing?
The trope is a relic: the signs used to be common, or more obvious, but not so much anymore. In this case, what were the signs, and why did they go away?
It’s just a trope or literary device: there are no signs, and the narrator is telling the reader that the character got a bad night’s sleep, or was ready to hop out of bed and into action.
I regularly walk the Camino, and many pilgrims sleep in the next day’s clothes. Even with technical gear, you can often see wrinkles, softening of creases (in clothes with creases), rumpling or bagginess (especially if they haven’t showered and re-dressed–pilgrims don’t usually shower before walking for the day), and bits of feathers, fluff, or lint from the bedding.
There are plenty of modern pilgrims, both Christian and Muslim. It’s not an idea which has gone away.
ETA: Whether it’s easy to tell whether clothes have been slept in depends a great deal on the clothes, and probably somewhat on how neatly you sleep. Some things wrinkle, some things twist around.
Yeah, I would mostly think wrinkles. Would apply to some types of clothing but not others: you probably wouldn’t notice sweats or a t-shirt, but would obviously notice a dress shirt.
Right. The phrase presupposes the kind of clothes that normally should be pressed, or hanged overnight, and look neat when worn, but that now look excessively crumpled on you.
The phrase also implies that you may have drank a bit and/or had sex/and or slept not-in-a-bed… There’s a certain look to the face and posture that says “slept in yesterday’s clothes.”
Camino de Santiago. 500,000 people completed at least 100 km and bothered to get the certificate in 2024. Many, many more walked sections or the whole thing. Plus other pilgrimage routes in Japan, to Lourdes, Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, in the US, and in other countries.
I used to work with a guy whose clothes were the most wrinkled I have ever seen. His family was in one of those “quiverfull” religious sects and he had five kids under six years old. I assume all clothes got washed together and he just pulled his stuff out of the dryer. Of maybe he did sleep in them.
I saw a line in a novel once, in the midst of some stressful situation: “His clothes looked like they had been slept in for the past week, which was odd, given that the man himself looked as though he had not slept in that same time.”
I had university students who would roll out of bed in their jammies and stagger to class. They were rumpled, uncombed, and stank like, well, stank. Plus they didn’t brush their teeth.
Not only disheveled and wrinkled but it makes me think of specific wrinkles. Like a long crease that implies you were laying in your rumpled shirt for a long while. Agreed that modern fabrics probably mitigate this to some degree.
If it’s a Walk of Shame worth mentioning, you didn’t sleep in your clothes
