Happy Birthday to the Nutcracker

Today is the 120th Anniversary of The Nutcracker Ballet (Google have sweetly marked the occasion with one of their little doodles.)

The Nutcracker was a highlight of every childhood Christmas for me, watched in my best party frock, on the edge of my plush, velvet, Royal Opera House seat.

So when it came to collaborating with fashion illustrator Isabella Cotier on a Christmas exclusive with Avenue 32, I knew I wanted to do something Nutcracker themed. And so the Clara PJs were born! Named after the lead in the Nutcracker Ballet who is given a nutcracker soldier who comes to life and inevitably whisks her off on a Christmas adventure....

Orders yours today HERE to guarantee Christmas delivery.

In Bed with Tchaikovsky!

We LOVE this snappy little video from Because London  based on the print of our Nutcracker-inspired Clara PJs. These really are the ultimate Christmas PJs- a wonderful gift and the perfect, fun yet stylish Christmas morning outfit!

They are limited edition and exclusive to Avenue 32. They're selling out fast, so get your pair HERE before they're all gone...

Modelled by Violet Hesketh, pretty little sister of Mary Charteris- watch out Mary!

Personalised POPLIN

We're so excited to launch our Monogramming Service, exclusively with Avenue 32 to celebrate VOGUE's Online Fashion Week. Get your loved ones' initials hand-embroidered by world-famous embroidery specialists, Hand&Lock, to transform beautiful POPLIN pjs into an even more special gift!  

Good Advice

... from ID Magazine:

"Think positively, exercise daily, eat healthily, work hard, stay strong, worry less, dance more and love often. ...You don't have to be old to be wise... "

POPLIN in How To Spend It

Joy wears POPLIN hand-printed silk Marlene PJs

Available Here

We were delighted with the article about POPLIN in the FT's How To Spend It. 

Read the article here

Marilyn Style

I have just come across a really hilarious interview with POPLIN muse, Marilyn Monroe, which includes this typically kooky 1950s advice on diet and lifestyle. 

“BREAKFAST. I’ve been told that my eating habits are absolutely bizarre, but I don’t think so. Before I take my morning shower, I start warming a cup of milk on the hot plate I keep in my hotel room. When it’s hot, I break two raw eggs into the milk, whip them up with a fork, and drink them while I’m dressing. I supplement this with a multi-vitamin pill, and I doubt if any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry.

DINNER. My dinners at home are startlingly simple. Every night I stop at the market near my hotel and pick up a steak, lamb chops or some liver, which I broil in the electric oven in my room. I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all. I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots.

P.S. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that I eat simply during the day, for in recent months I have developed the habit of stopping off at Wil Wright’s ice cream parlor for a hot fudge sundae on my way home from my evening drama classes. I’m sure that I couldn’t allow myself this indulgence were it not that my normal diet is composed almost totally of protein foods.”

Our Marilyn Silk PJs are inspired by the quintessential Hollywood starlet's feline glamour: black leopard jacquard silk with a leopard print trim. Classic but slightly outrageous, like their namesake... 

Limited Editions AVAILABLE NOW at Ave 32

Tim Walker: Storyteller

It was "back to school" for me when I visited the Tim Walker "Storyteller" exhibition a couple of weeks ago: the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I did my MA in Fashion History, is also based in Somerset House, so my Saturday afternoon treat brought back lots of happy, ink-stained, library book-laden, memories.

But after a dream-like wander through the East Galleries, filled with Walker's whimsical photographs and many of the visionary props he uses to create them, my eye was firmly fixed on the future and the madcap designs and ideas for POPLIN that his images always inspire in me.  

It was so refreshing to go around an art/fashion exhibition- Walker rides both horses- with people laughing, smiling and relaxing, and without the usual self-conscious stiffness that a gallery environment can provoke. 

These are just a few of my favourite images, but I have a particular fondness for the self-portrait in PYJAMAS above! Kindred spirits indeed... 

Tim Walker: Storyteller runs until 27 January at Somerset House London 

Entry is FREE! 

Reading in your Pyjamas

Although Amazon is wonderful in its convenience, for me it's all about real bookshops with beating hearts, and Lutyens and Rubinstein in Notting Hill in particular: it's my hands-down favourite.

 I always dawdle at the front of L&R, browsing the new crop, and getting tips from the (mostly) lady bibliophiles who work in the shop.

Here are a few recent and highly recommended finds. Best enjoyed tucked up in bed or sprawled (elegantly) on the sofa in a pair of POPLIN PJs!

- Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson 
I won't list the prizes this has won, I'll just say that it's a moving insight into Winterson's understanding of her unconventional childhood and the unconventional adulthood it shaped. I found this memoir challenging because of the absolute nature of Winterson's emotions and my own resistance to her polemical story-telling. Perhaps you don't have to believe every word someone says to enjoy their story...

- The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt
This is a pleasingly esoteric meander through the over-lapping worlds of psychiatry, neurology and psychoanalysis. A blend of personal anecdote and passionate research. Like an into-the-night (pyjama clad?) conversation with a very wise and possibly slightly neurotic friend.

- Alys Always by Harriet Lane 
The claustrophobic London literary and publishing spheres are the setting for Lane's gripping and quietly provocative novel. The eventual chill creeps up on you gradually- Lane is an excellent raconteur! This compelling novel has been foisted upon many of my friends, and they have ALL wolfed it down and loved it!  Hope you will too...

Happy #readinginyourpyjamas! 

Breakfast Muse: Jean Shrimpton

Jean Shrimpton is our current gamine, bed-in-breakfast muse. Really enjoying wearing our POPLIN PJs inspired by her effortless '60s style in the slinkiest navy blue cotton with classic white piping. Exclusive to Avenue 32. 

Shrimpton Classic PJs 

Available Here 

Valentine

Before there was the new season of Downton Abbey to get snuggled up in-front of on a Sunday night, in your POPLIN PJs... there was Parade's End.

Ford Maddox Ford's wartime novel was reworked for the small screen by Tom Stoppard with an impressive cast of names including POPLIN favourite, Rebecca Hall, and Benedict Cumberbatch.
But it was new name, Adelaide Clemens, or rather the character she plays- Valentine Wannop, who became our latest girl-crush. Her flighty, noble character is the perfect foil to the haughty wife played by Rebecca Hall, and we were rooting for romance to blossom between her and the most stiff upper-lipped of all heroes- Christopher Tietjens.

Anyway, this isn't a review of the drama itself, but a quick snapshot of Valentine's wonderful look: a shock of fairy-like blonde hair, ladylike buttoned up collars and a puff of broderie anglaise, finished off with a suffragette sash. How chic!

BARDOT is Back!

SHOP HERE NOW

Our hugely popular POPLIN Classic Bardot Pyjamas are back in stock in all sizes!
Model and style muse Laura Bailey has called them "pretty perfect" and we're inclined to agree: channelling effortless French style, timelessly sophisticated and flattering on women of all ages- from 16 to 65.
Soft white cotton, chic navy piping, flattering loose-cut trousers and a classic, gamine pyjama shirt.


  

Girl in a Nightshirt

A rainy morning spent sheltering in Tate Britain today, to see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition. It was brimming with inspiration for AW13/14: the fashion merry-go-round means that design for next Winter is already well under way. 

But what caught my eye and captured my ever pyjama-clad imagination was this Lucian Freud of a girl in a classic, masculine night-shirt. 

It reminded me in its tomboyish simplicity of our POPLIN Mitford Nightshirt. 

Available here. 

Stolen Summer

A few weeks ago POPLIN headed to NYC during Fashion Week for a flurry of meetings- with old, friendly faces and new, exciting ones.

Then, brimming with the city's infectious energy, we headed to Montauk for a stolen summer night, before heading back to London.

 Of course we had to stay at The Surf Lodge... Honestly, our arrival lunch was marred by an almost laughably rude, "wannabe" surfer/waiter and we were feeling a little sceptical. But after an afternoon on the incredible beach (POPLIN shirt slung over swim suit), The Lodge redeemed itself with an evening of the best reggae, delicious cocktails and fresh, Indian summer food, that soothed the soul and gave me the sort of Cloud 9 feeling that lasted all the way back across the Atlantic. 

The Eye Has to Travel

Chilly pyjama weather has well and truly hit London, which means two things: POPLIN pyjamas, obviously, and the cinema. And what a cinema the Hackney Picture House is!? Spectacularly big and comfortable! And showing Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel which is a sheer delight.

 The documentary cuts together old footage and images that glide across the screen like a digitalised version of a clunky, lecture hall slide show; and amuses with Vreeland's more-is-more approach to the aesthetic and emphatic mode of speech.

 Everyone who knew her (bar her children perhaps) professes to have been invigorated by her company, her sheer presence, and an hour or so in the cinema with her has much the same effect. 

Vreeland was full of witty, facetious and esoteric responses to the world, but my favourite was her attitude to beauty: make the most of your faults. If one has a long nose, celebrate it! Be photographed in profile! A little taller than is conventionally "feminine"? Wear skyscraper heels! 

She had a sincere appreciation of variety and individuality. And the people she styled and featured in her magazine (she was editor of Harper's and then Vogue) always looked like themselves, not a version of anybody else. It truly is a liberating way to think about fashion and about beauty. 

What's the opposite of homesick?

Dear Bombay Sunset, 

Wait for me! I'm coming back soon... 

Love POPLIN x 

Autumn Obsession

Shop Iris Classic PJs 

There is definitely an autumn nip in the air that makes us want to get into our candy striped POPLIN Iris Classic PJs and snuggle up to watch the new series of Downton Abbey or 'don't look now' French cop series Engrenages a.k.a. our latest obsession. 

Playing Games

For the Spring Summer '13 season POPLIN went to Umbria in Italy to shoot our lookbook. We were lucky enough to borrow the absolutely beautiful Casa Fizia, surrounded by lavender, olive groves and gentle Umbrian countryside.

The styling flowed so naturally as we put together the looks as girls on (an almost) holiday, wanting to feel glamorous and grown-up, with the feeling of effortlessness that a sun tan and dips in the pool naturally bestow. That meant silk kimonos slung over bikinis, cotton nightshirts for al fresco breakfasts and silk pyjamas for a sunset cocktail.

But the upcoming collection also has a graphic dimension that was echoed in the lines of the tennis court. The product shots were the last thing we shot and we'd pondered all week about where to shoot them: on the patchwork stone work of the house? Back in London in an airless studio? The verdant tennis court with the Italian sun as natural spot-lighting dawned on us as the perfect location.

A teaser for now... We can't wait to share the collection with you soon! 

Cooking in Your Pyjamas: Behind the Scenes of SS13 Shoot

A 'behind the scenes' peek into the kitchen of our SS13 shoot in Italy's beautiful Umbria.

We had lots of looks to shoot from the new POPLIN SS13 collection, but we made sure that we took time everyday for a relaxing lunch and supper, round the kitchen table or under the lovely loggia overlooking the olive grove that surrounded the incredible house we were lucky enough to be shooting at. It made for a very civilised shoot, recipes shared amongst the team and new friendships forged. 

Favourites were a simple breakfast of figs (picked straight from the tree! I know- we were spoilt!) with natural yogurt and a swirl of berry compote;and a salad, copied from a dinner party at a friend's house back in London and recreated for our grateful team in Italy! Toasted pine nuts + sliced ripe peaches+ rocket+ torn mozzarella + balsamic dressing = heaven!