Matching pajamas that still get worn in February

Everybody buys matching pajamas for the same reason: one morning a year when the whole household is in the same room and somebody takes a photograph.

That is a perfectly good reason. It is also about four hours out of a garment's life, and what decides whether the money was well spent is what happens to the sets afterwards.

The first question is whether matching is even possible

A print is only a family print if it exists in every size somebody in the house needs. Most prints do not, and almost nobody checks before ordering.

Counted from our own range on the date below, here is which prints reach which departments.

The number of prints that reach everybody is small, and it is small everywhere rather than only here. A family print needs a separate pattern for a baby, a child, a teenager and two adults, which is five garments pretending to be one.

What to buy for the photograph

If the morning is genuinely the point, buy for it honestly and do not pretend otherwise.

• Pick the loudest print that reaches everybody. A subtle family print photographs as five people in similar pyjamas, which is not the same thing at all.
• Buy the whole set in one order. Seasonal sizes go unevenly, and coming back for the last person in December is how a family ends up four fifths matching.
• Order earlier than feels necessary. A print made in one run does not come back the same year.
• Accept that this set is seasonal. A reindeer set will be worn in December and put away, and that is fine as long as you did not pay for it expecting a year of wear.

What to buy for the other 364 days

The sets that actually get worn are the plain ones, and this is the part nobody puts on the front of a catalogue.

Stripes, solids, plaid. A plaid family set worn in November is still being worn in March, because nothing about it says December. The same money in a Santa print buys four wears.

So the useful shape of an order for most households is one seasonal print for the morning, and one plain print that becomes ordinary pyjamas. That is two orders rather than one, and it is the split that stops matching pyjamas being a once-a-year purchase that lives in a drawer.

Why cotton decides how long the matching lasts

Matching only survives if all the sets age at the same rate, and that comes down to fibre.

A household in five cotton sets washed the same way stays matching. Mix a cotton child's set with a polyester adult one and after a season they are two different colours of the same red, because the two fibres take dye differently and fade differently.

This is the practical argument for buying the whole family from one range rather than assembling something similar from four places. Not brand loyalty, just fibre behaving consistently.

Washing five sets that have to stay the same

There is a specific hazard with matching sets: they get washed differently by different people, and they drift apart.

The care line is the same across a family print because the fabric is the same. So the answer is to wash them together, cool, and dry them the same way. Five sets treated as one item stay looking like one item.

The adult sets are the ones most likely to get washed hot, because adult laundry usually does. That is how the dad's set ends up half a shade off everyone else's by the second year.

The calendar, and the one week that ruins it

Seasonal sleepwear runs on a schedule that has nothing to do with when people think about buying it.

1. Late summer: the full size run exists for the winter prints. You are guessing at three months of a child's growth.
2. Autumn: the sensible window. Sizes are still broad, growth is predictable, and nothing has gone yet.
3. Early December: the popular children's sizes start disappearing. Adults last longer.
4. The week itself: whatever is left, which is rarely a whole family in one print.

None of that is a scarcity tactic, it is what a single production run does. The honest version is that the last week is the worst week, and everybody shops in it anyway.

Five people, five different garments

A family print looks like one design repeated. It is not, and knowing that explains most of what goes wrong with an order.

The baby version is a footed sleeper or a two-piece with a snap gusset. The toddler version has a wider neck so it goes over a head that is large for the body. The child version is the straightforward one. The adult versions split into two cuts, and the print has to be re-scaled for each so it does not read as a giant repeat on a small garment and a tiny one on a large.

Five garments, five patterns, five size runs, one print. That is why the family prints are a small part of any range rather than the whole of it, and why a print that reaches all five departments is worth ordering when you find one.

It also explains a thing families notice and find odd: the colour can sit slightly differently on the baby set. Small garments are cut from different parts of the roll, and on a printed cotton that is visible in a photograph even when it is invisible in a drawer.

Where the money actually goes

Five sets is five garments' worth of money spent in one click, and that is the part that makes people hesitate at the last step.

The useful way to think about it is per wear rather than per set. A plain family set worn twice a week through a winter costs pennies a wear. A character print worn for one morning costs the whole price of the set. Neither is wrong, but they are different purchases and it helps to know which one you are making.

The other honest line is that you do not have to buy all five at full attention. The children outgrow theirs and will need replacing next year regardless. The adult sets, bought in a plain print, last several years, because adults stop growing and cotton in a plain colour does not date.

Households the standard advice does not fit

A teenager

A fourteen year old who has decided matching pyjamas are humiliating is not going to be talked round by a better print. The workable version is the plain family colour rather than the character print, so they are technically matching without being in costume.

A newborn arriving mid-season

Buy the baby set last and in the size for the month the photograph happens rather than the month you order. Babies pass through a size in weeks, and a newborn set bought in October is small by Christmas.

Two households

Separated families matching across two homes have a coordination problem rather than a sizing one. One person orders everything at once, or it does not happen. This is the single most common way a family print ends up incomplete.

A dog

We do not make pet sets, so this is one where the honest answer is that the dog sits this one out or wears something from somewhere else.

Storing a set so it is there next year

Seasonal family sets spend eleven months in a cupboard, and that is where most of them are lost rather than worn out.

• Wash before storing. A set put away worn attracts everything that eats cotton, and the marks set over a year.
• Store the whole family print together in one bag. Sets stored separately are sets found separately, which is to say four out of five in December.
• Write the sizes on the bag. Next November nobody remembers whether the child was in a six or an eight, and the set that no longer fits is the one that ends the tradition.
• Check the children's sets in autumn, not in December. A set that has become too small is a problem with six weeks of solutions and no solutions at all in the last week.

What this is actually worth

A seasonal family set gets perhaps six wears. A plain one gets sixty. The arithmetic is not close, and it is the reason the advice above keeps coming back to buying one of each.

The photograph is worth paying for. It just is not worth paying for five times over in five different prints that each get worn once. If you are sizing a whole household in one order, the piece on sizing children without the child has the order of operations that keeps it from going wrong.