For about a year, a dress stalked me on Instagram. It was made of semi-sheer white cotton and hit at the mid-calf. It was covered in nubbly swiss dots and had a fey little ruffle adorning each thick shoulder strap, like the edges of a conch shell. The bodice was smocked in soft, accordion-like fabric, creating the gentlest suggestion of corseting. It looked like a dress that the young heroine of a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel might pull out of a steamer trunk, or like something that a tubercular patient might wear to recuperate in a Swiss facility in the nineteen-tens. It looked as light and sweet as meringue. It looked frighteningly easy to stain.
I finally succumbed to this dress last month, not only because of its incessant presence on my feed but because of its alluring name: the Nap Dress. I purchased it in the wee hours of the morning, during one of my frequent bouts of pandemic-induced insomnia. Since sleeping through the night was not happening, I figured an outfit specifically designated for daytime dozing might be just the thing. One could theoretically wear a Nap Dress to bed, but it is decidedly not a nightgown. (For one, it is opaque enough to wear to the grocery store.) It is not the same thing as a caftan, which, though often luxurious, is more shapeless and more grown-up. It is not a housedress, which we tend to associate with older women shuffling onto the stoop to grab the morning paper, the curlers still in their hair. A housedress is about forgetting the self, or at least hiding it under layers of quilted fabric. The Nap Dress, on the other hand, suggests a cheeky indulgence for one’s body, and a childlike return to waking up bleary-eyed hours before dinner.
Nell Diamond, the C.E.O. of Hill House Home, the company that makes the Nap Dress, told me recently, over Zoom, that she has been accused of opportunistically naming the garment for quarantine, when so many people are jittery and pacing their own hallways, and loungewear is one of the few things sure to sell. In fact, she began developing the Nap Dress two years ago, and trademarked the name in January, when the coronavirus in this country still seemed a distant threat. A thirty-one-year-old American who grew up mostly in London, Diamond came up with the idea for Hill House Home while she was working as an analyst at Deutsche Bank, and cultivating a personal aesthetic that she refers to as “Victorian ghost.” “I walked into that trading floor full of all of these men in their Patagonia vests,” she said. “I did it with my bow in my hair and my headband and my cute little part and my cat eye. And I said, ‘Watch me.’ ”
Diamond launched the company with a line of bedding, in 2016, and started selling Nap Dresses in four styles last year. The one that followed me around is the “Ellie” ($125). There is also the “Athena,” ($100), a minidress with oversized puff sleeves; the “Katherine“ ($75), a short sheath with a dainty ruffle hem; and the “Caroline” (also $100), the most conservative of the bunch, with a long skirt and a high-smocked neck. Diamond’s first capsule collection of Nap Dresses sold out within a day. In the past year, she has released all four styles in a variety of hues and patterns, including pink stripes, green gingham, and white with powder-blue swiss dots, the top-selling color. (They are made primarily in Madagascar, in a factory that Diamond chose because, she told me, it is woman-owned.) Since the beginning of 2020, Diamond said, her Nap Dress business has increased sevenfold.
On a recent Zoom call, Diamond, who has a three-year-old son and is pregnant with twins, looked less like a Victorian ghost than a milkmaid, wearing a white Ellie Dress with her long brown hair in braided pigtails. Her interest in period loungewear, she explained, dates back to her college days, at Princeton, where she wrote her senior English thesis on “Pre-Raphaelite women using very traditional notions of femininity to quietly subvert their husbands,” with a focus on a single line from Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” about Eve’s wild hair. She became interested in the connection between the white cotton gown and hysteria; it was the signature garment of sanatoriums and dusty attics, of women in Victorian novels who have been pronounced “mad” but are in fact victims of trauma or abuse.
Later, Diamond sent me several paintings that she saw as her Nap Dress vision board: John William Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” (1888), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” (1867), John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia” (1851), all of which feature (white, slender) women in various states of repose, looking equally fragile and formidable with gauzy gowns and flame-red hair. Elizabeth Siddal, the model who floated in a bathtub for several months—and once fell ill, with what was thought to be pneumonia—so that Millais could depict the drowning Ophelia, was a painter in her own right, and struggled with depression and thwarted ambition until she died, of a laudanum overdose, at only thirty-two. Siddal wanted more for herself than to be a muse, and yet she continues to be one—for the Nap Dress.
Diamond may own the phrase, but hers is not the only company hawking Nap Dress-like garments during quarantine. The Brooklyn-based store Salter House sells a pintucked cotton version ($68); the British emporium White Nightie has been swamped with orders. For those looking to splurge, the Italian designer Loretta Caponi pushes the pastoral, cottagecore fantasy into the luxury space, with her ivory lace-slip dresses that can cost upwards of nine hundred euros. (The exact point at which a Nap Dress tilts into a wedding dress is yours to judge.)
We are used to seeing women in white nightgowns as haunted, anxious, skulking around with unfinished business. But there is also the figure of the innocent child in white, a kind of prelapsarian state of guilelessness and imagination. The Nap Dress combines these associations into a single garment; it is children’s clothing sized up for adults, or creepy, adult ghost clothes festooned with sweet and approachable details. It is a dress that connotes both extreme stress and also the cessation of it. How wonderful it would be, the Nap Dress suggests, to finally be able to rest after all the hand-wringing.
Victorian garments, even ones that have been reimagined, retain a faint whiff of the era’s colonialism: there is privilege inherent in dressing for gussied-up oblivion. The Nap Dress, with its twin promise of beauty and sleep, makes me think of the frock-clad woman on the cover of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” which tells the story of a wealthy young Manhattanite who drugs herself into a stupor and holes up in her apartment for several months. Essential workers cannot dress for napping. There is little rest for the weary. But, for those who can take a stolen moment of repose, the Nap Dress has a tranquillizing allure. It is a clean slate, white noise, a gauzy, brief escape for those who can afford it.
