Long Live the Nap Dress In All Its Glorious Forms

Everything is maternity clothes now!

In 2020, dress called the Nap Dress from a fashion label called Hill House went viral, both as an article of clothing and a topic of conversation. It was the perfect garment for the perfect time, zeitgeist-as-loungewear.

Its designer trademarked the name back in January 2020, two months before everything stateside locked down and life became an unending night of anxious insomnia and ennui for the privileged and an unending nightmare of overwork for the front line workers the privileged applauded every night at 8. Its timing was almost miraculous.

Nothing popular escapes scrutiny, especially if it's popular because it makes people feel good, and double especially if it's something expensive that women with a lot of disposable income enjoy. With a price tag of over $120, the Nap Dress was the perfect foil. In July of 2020, New Yorker described the dress as "the look of gussied-up oblivion." "What is a 'Nap Dress' and Why Do Women Want It So Badly?" asked the Wall Street Journal that fall.

The Mary Sue emphatically declared the Nap Dress "not a thing." "My Nap Dress is a Big Old Tee Shirt," wrote The Cut's Anna Silman, also skeptical of the trend of taking athleisure to its English countryside manor ghost extreme.

But the Nap Dress and its imitators only grew more powerful. "The Nap Dress Must Be Stopped," Elle magazine demanded--futilely-- in February 2021, because it seems the writer felt that the dress was meant to be changed into, a garment for people without kids, with the free time to swap outfits five times a day.

"Yes, Nap Dresses are Still a Thing--" The Hollywood Reporter admitted with defeat earlier this month, "Here are some fall-ready options." You can almost hear the resigned sigh in the emdash.

I enjoy the work of many of the writers I singled out here, but on this issue, they are all wrong. Nap dresses were always the future. Nap dresses are now the present.

Women's clothing trends have long been on thin ice with me. I was on board when it was cool to dress like Wednesday Addams, I could get down with wearing tights underneath cutoff shorts, I loved a Peter Pan collar and could even jam out with one of those skirts with a lightweight sheer layer on top that billowed out so much they sometimes ran the risk of getting caught under the feet of people coming down the subway station stairs behind me. But then things started going south in, I want to say, 2015, when women's sleeves went crazy.

I have an unfounded theory that the sleeves of 2015-2020 were inflicted on us out of revenge. What the fashion industry wanted us to do as consumers to buy new pants; we'd been wearing skinny jeans for more than a decade at that point. But We the People did not want to part with our skinny jeans in 2015. So they fired back, in the form of women's fashion dominated by sleeves that went beyond fashion crime, they were fashion human rights violations. Puffed, belled ruffled, layered, cutout, buttoned, tied up in gigantic bows. It was as though we were universally horrified by the shape of human arms. Like this:

We're still dealing with the fallout of the assault on sleeves, and it may take years--or decades--for fashion to fully heal from these atrocities.

But then along came the nap dress and its array of attendant billowing dress sacks, and I forgive fashion like it just apologized for forgetting our anniversary by cooking me a four-course meal. As a woman who is pregnant in the heyday of this aesthetic, I selfishly hope it hangs on for at least a few more years.

The other week, I went into an H&M for the first time since early 2020. My midsection has reached the size where I can't wear any of my pre-pregnancy tee shirts anymore; they ride up my stomach, making me look a bit like Smee from Disney's Peter Pan, except less sexy. And H&M's straight-size collection was more than able to dress my third trimester body; I was able to walk out of there with a couple of dresses in my normal size, roomy enough for me to smuggle a whole baby or a set of matching luggage. The dress selection was a carousel of nightgowns.

Hell yes.

It's not just H&M. Other retailers have gone all-in on Fuck It fashion; from Target to Trina Turk. It's as though women, driven to their absolute limit by the hellscape that was 2020, took out a full page ad in the New York Times for a letter demanding that fashion give us clothing we can comfortably lie down in. It's literally the least they could do.

Nap Dress naysayers did not see what the original Nap Dress meant. The extreme loungewear trend was never going to stop at the original Nap Dress; rather than create a culture of rich lady nap dress exclusivity, Hill House walked so that Shein's $14 calf-length tee shirt dress could run. Your Nap dress can and should be a big old tee shirt. Your nap dress is not something you change into; it's something you put on in the morning in hopes that you will have a second to yourself. It is a garment of both resignation and hope. It says "I am exhausted, but I am comfortable enough that I could sleep at a moment's notice." Like a fireman of leisure. To the perpetually exhausted, overworked, or pregnant, this is a godsend.

We cannot take the gifts of the Nap Dress for granted. My heart goes out to people who had children when I was entering adulthood in the post-9/11 era. Mega low-rise jeans, the Going Out Top, belly-baring tops, layered tanks. (Does anybody remember those knit tube tops that were sold with matching cardigans to wear over them?) Fashion of the Y2K era was designed to make women of all sizes feel like 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack; it's a miracle any girls and women who lived through that era survived with any self esteem at all, much less those who were dealing with normal pregnancy and postpartum body issues.

But no more! As long as the legacy of the Nap Dress lives on, those of us who are dressing for two no longer have to worry about buying special "maternity" clothes to accommodate our changing bodies. Further, once this kid is out of me, I don't have to stress myself out trying to fit into my "regular" clothes right away. These giant cotton bags are my regular clothes. If enormous dresses continue to be standard, a post-baby get-out-of-the-house shopping trip doesn't need to spiral into me feeling bad about my stomach, or being paranoid that strangers are staring at my thighs. If I feel like keeping all of my curves and bumps tucked away in wearable tent, fashion can facilitate that.

Long live the Nap Dress, and any big old tee shirts that will have me.

Image via Shutterstock.