I have a question about Netflix and chill. I love asking awkward questions about Netflix and chill, and watching all you millenial young’uns squirm and go pink as you try and explain how box sets and sexy time have been combined in the frankly baffling world of modern dating. It’s like the birds-and-the-bees conversation, but with the kids having to explain to the grown-ups How It Works.
The bit I don’t get is: now that watching TV is a hot lifestyle move, what do you wear? What’s the Netflix and chill dress code? Clothes are how I make sense of the world. They give me, like Cher Horowitz in Clueless, a sense of control in a world full of chaos. If I can figure out what to wear for any given occasion, I feel like I have got a handle on it. All of us do this, to an extent: it’s why we stress so much about what to wear to job interviews, or first dates. The right outfit is as much about getting your own head in the zone as it is about what anyone else makes of it.
Watching television means something quite different than it did 10 years ago. TV has gone from being the background hubbub of daily life to setting the agenda. Long before Netflix and chill happened, the way we watch TV was changing. Once we watched soap operas in polite early-evening half hours, as if partaking of a small sweet sherry; now, we gorge ourselves late into the night, mainlining episodes way past our bedtime. And, on the subject of bedtimes, television grew increasingly grown up. Remember when it was something kids wanted to watch and adults turned their noses up at? Not any more. Few kids past the Peppa Pig years are much interested in watching scheduled TV; and anyway, the parents want them tucked in upstairs, so they don’t come barging into the sitting room causing a distraction during a crucial plot twist in The Bridge.
The moment watching TV became a thing rather than what you did if you weren’t doing anything else, the impact on our wardrobes was evident. The phenomenon of staying up too late to watch just one more episode of Breaking Bad was exactly how the onesie happened. The onesie took the natural, sensible strategy of wearing something comfortable that would keep you warm when you hadn’t moved for hours, and exaggerated it. It trumped the elasticated waistband by introducing a silhouette that had no waistband at all. It took the silhouette that traditionally stands for incarceration, gave it a fleece lining and turned it into what to wear when not leaving the house is a lifestyle choice.
The onesie was the first instance of a “look” for watching television. The moment when fashion starts inventing “looks” for activities is always the moment when you know they have arrived. (See: brunch, the mini-break, going for a run.)
The television-watching look seems to me the most important overlooked sartorial issue of this time of year. We are at saturation point with novelty jumpers; we have, surely, reached peak office-party-jumpsuit. Close readers of our coverage will have noticed that we on the Guardian fashion desk have lately made the bold move, essential for the blossoming of any nascent trend, of championing a silly name for it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you dormcore.
Dormcore is the love child of normcore and Grace Coddington in pyjamas. It is staying-in clothes as statement fashion; not-trying-too-hard as a badge of honour. It is partywear for the post-FOMO generation who make social arrangments knowing, even as they tap out the “can’t wait” text, that they will cancel the night before and stay in. After all, staying in no longer takes you off radar: you need a good look for that sofa selfie, right?
So tartan pyjamas and toothpaste on the spots on your chin doesn’t cut it. Crisp cotton pyjamas have a bookish, androgynous vibe which is perfect for watching Scandi stuff with subtitles, where the women, while beautiful, wear the same outfit through six episodes and have their not-quite-clean hair in a ponytail. Athleisure yoga pants or cuffed tracksuit bottoms with washed-out-but-flattering T-shirts are good for restless young folk who scroll through endless options without agreeing on what to watch, because they only need add loafers and a shoulder-robed tailored coat if they decide to go to the pub after all.
As ever with fashion, it is the accessories that make the final look. If you are going to post the currently de-rigueur Instagram of a coffee table laden with takeout cartons or the kind of snacks that look like you ram-raided a petrol station, you may wish to invest in a pair of double-ply cashmere socks in order to complete the view-from-the-sofa picture. The Netflix and chill types will probably need, I don’t know, a neon lace bralet from American Apparel or similar. Me? I will be finishing my Christmas-TV-watching look with the classic accessories: a copy of the Radio Times and a highlighter pen.
