Party Dresses or Pyjamas? Sartorial Choices in Film’s Depictions of Christmas Day
Make it stand out
Do you dress up or down on Christmas Day? It’s a question that feels equal in calibre to queries around whether Yorkshire puddings belong on your plate, and the correct time to open presents. The notion of dressing up for Xmas can be traced back to the Tudor period, where Henry VIII was partial to popping on brand new clothes for the occasion. In the Victorian era, Christmas celebrations got into full swing, ordaining varying degrees of formal dress depending on what kind of event you were attending on the 25th. And it was in the ‘90s when strict dress codes for Christmas apparently ended and everyone went for an “anything goes” vibe.
Thirty years on, there’s really no inkling that choosing to dress down on Christmas day would have once been a bold rejection of the status quo. Now, it’s simply a matter of personal preference. And in contemporary Christmas films, whatever that preference may be is made into a meaningful extension of each character’s identity. With all the mad stuff that happens in recent films of the genre — Keira Knightley realising she’s “quite pretty” while wearing a fugly hat for one — this sartorial choice often, unfortunately, fades into the background.
Christmas films are often formulaic; that’s what makes them so comforting to watch. It means that they largely conclude in one of two ways: On the Christmas day that the whole film’s been leading up to, after all the personality-altering hijinks in the first three quarters of the film. Or on Christmas day of the next year, where the characters have been given 365 days to get to grips with the parts of their identity that they discovered last Crimbo. Essentially, holiday movies are about metamorphosis and the clothes each character wears on the big day are an integral part of how they signal that a transformation has taken place.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
In 2005’s slightly incestual The Family Stone, it’s Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) that’s the most obvious site of this. Encouraged to “fly her freak flag” — whatever that means — by Ben (Luke Wilson) throughout the film, on Christmas Day we get the first glimpse of her character before she’s had time to meticulously prune herself and pop on the austere outfits she’s donned up until now. Waking up in Ben’s bed, her hair is messy, she’s actually unclothed, and though she does manage to slip into her reliable uniform, the jacket quickly comes off to reveal a floaty shirt that ends up getting covered in strata, a dish I’ve never heard of outside of this film. If her slightly severe black skirt suits positioned her as uptight and unyielding, the food-sodden shirt implies the opposite. And when the family reconvenes the following festive period, Meredith’s new-found happy-go-lucky nature is solidified through a decidedly casual fit. In other films of the genre, it’s more of the same: In Elf, Buddy (Will Ferrell) swaps out his bright green garbs for something more normcore. And in About a Boy — which isn’t strictly a Christmas film, I know — Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) is finally wearing the “cool” clothes he always wanted to, no longer forced into an embarrassing jumper by his neurotic mother.
Yet by purporting that these characters needed to change the core tenets of their personality — or at least put on the facade of doing so — in order to be accepted, there’s a regressive undertone to these Christmassy acts of metamorphosis. It’s for this reason that I get a little kick out of the scene in which Buddy returns to the North Pole just before Elf’s credits roll, and we see him back in his iconic green and yellow outfit. It’s why I quite like that at the end of About a Boy, Fiona’s style is unscathed.
“Essentially, holiday movies are about metamorphosis and the clothes each character wears on the big day are an integral part of how they signal that a transformation has taken place.”
The backwards symbolism of the costumes in Christmas films is illustrated no better than by Bridget Jones’s Diary. Taking place over the course of one year, Christmas Day sandwiches the main narrative of the film and towards the end of the movie the festive season is used to show how Bridget’s (Renée Zellweger) life has taken a downward turn. After screwing things up with Mark Darcy (Colin Farrell) once again, she retreats to her parents house and we see her and her father spend Christmas day in pyjamas. Bridget’s blue set features cartoon pigs, paired with unkempt hair and a haphazardly-worn paper hat. In the world of Bridget Jones’s Diary, this isn’t just our protagonist putting her feet up after a hard year: it connotes that she’s a spinster.
There is a glimmer of hope in Bridget Jones’s Diary: shortly after the scene in question, the film concludes with the notion that Mark Darcy more or less accepts Bridget for who she is, and they share their first kiss while Bridget wears not much more than a vest and a “regular” sized pair of animal print knickers. But would this ending have occurred if she ran through the snow with a cig hanging out of her mouth wearing another dowdy pair of pyjamas? To be honest, probably, but we can’t say for certain.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s no better illustration of how dressing down on Christmas day can be liberating than Todd Haynes’ Carol. While the characteristically chic Carol (Cate Blanchett) is by no means popping on a pair of slobby PJs, the outfit worn when she and Therese (Rooney Mara) exchange Christmas gifts is scaled back by her own standards. She swaps out the “inaccessible sophistication” of her extravagant furs for a more unassuming cardigan and matching top in a muted green colour. It’s an outfit — like all her outfits worn on their road trip, and at one point they really do wear pyjamas — that connotes how she and Therese’s romance exists within a “heterotopia”: an “other space” which allows not only for their transgressive desire, but for Carol to relinquish her glamorous facade. Revisionist readings of Bridget Jones’s Diary — those that believe that the pyjama-adorned Bridget was the image of “an independent woman” — tap into something similar. Though she might not have been able to see it, Bridget entered her own (slightly progressive) heterotopia when she slipped into her piggie themed flannels.
While our lives aren’t punctuated by the same narrative cues as mainstream cinema, being intentional with what you wear on Christmas day can kind of help add a little glamour to our annual traditions. I’m not saying that, like The Family Stone’s Meredith, you should do a total 360 on your personal style to demonstrate what a transformative year you’ve had but whatever you do choose — whether you dress up or down — you can inject it with a little film-esque flavour. Opted for pyjamas because you quite simply can’t be bothered with anything else? No, you’re in a kind of heterotopia, occupying a space where you’re unbridled from the societal norms which dictate you have to dress a certain way. That puts a much nicer spin on it, doesn’t it?
Words: Amber Rawlings