The pyjamas that David Beckham buys for Victoria — every year
When Olivia von Halle couldn’t find any silk PJs to suit her, she designed her own. Now, her luxurious designs sell for £2,450 a pop — to a very discerning clientele
Not all pyjamas are created equal, as anyone lucky enough to have worn a pair from Olivia von Halle knows. Take the Lila Effie Green Floral silk satin style (£560), which reminds me of when I was invited for brunch by — ahem — the Duke of Buccleuch earlier this year. I will spare you the details, except to say that the ravishing print is the spit of the hand-painted wall hangings in the Duke’s Morning Room. Yup. That’s how I roll. Not.
The jimjams from OVH — as it is known to its friends — are for those who have ideas above their station, in other words. But also, increasingly, for those whose station is beyond imagining. Even von Halle expresses stupefaction at the fact that, over the past year, the typical spend per order has risen from £600 a pop to a positively ducal £1,400.
“It’s crazy,” she says. “The one per cent customer, if not the 0.1 per cent, is going nuts at the moment. So we keep dreaming up more and more super-luxurious ideas.” Like the aptly named Vanderbilt pyjamas at £2,450, part of the new superlight woven cashmere range and also available in tracksuit form (elasticated hems on the trousers, a daywear-styled shirt) for £2,750. “We called this collection PureCash to be tongue-in-cheek,” von Halle, 40, continues. “We thought, ‘Can we really sell pyjamas that cost that much?’ And the answer has been, ‘Yes, yes, we can!’ ”
So it’s a given that OVH will still be found wrapped up under the best Christmas trees this year. David Beckham has given a pair to Victoria every Christmas since 2012. “It is really fun designing for that customer because you don’t need to think about price,” von Halle says. “But I don’t only want to design for them. For the moment the aspirational shopper has vanished; the woman who used to buy herself — or be bought as a present — one pair a year. It brought me a huge amount of joy that we were loved by people from all backgrounds. I believe they will be back.”
The brand was launched in 2011 in response, as is the case with many of the most successful fashion operations, to a personal wardrobe crisis. Von Halle had moved to Shanghai with her husband and — at 6ft and a size 14 — couldn’t find anything to buy in the shops to wear through the city’s “insanely hot” summer. So she asked a tailor to make her some silk pyjamas. Every time she wore them she would be asked where she got them.
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Having scoped out what was available back in the west, she realised there was a proper gap in the market. Posh pyjamas existed on Jermyn Street and the like but they were mainly for men, mainly po-faced and definitely for the bedroom only. She set out to meld the very best quality — her silks for example are 19 momme, which is the heaviest weight available, and feel completely different from that of most of the copycat brands that have sprung up since — with a sumptuously feminine aesthetic, one that was designed to be seen.
What she was anticipating, if not creating, like the good trend forecaster that she once was, was the athleisure-adjacent phenomenon that is loungewear. Both are about the reincarnation of a type of clothing that originally had a specific practical focus as something akin to a way of life; a state of being. Both are about comfort, about relaxedness. Both signal a kind of youthfulness — undoneness even — that has become a status symbol of its own.
It’s a sign of von Halle’s remarkable achievement that hers is a brand that — despite its comparative smallness, its lack of marketing and advertising budgets and its inability to leverage economies of scale — holds its own against the luxury conglomerates. “One of the Harrods personal shoppers told me the other day that OVH is the only label his customers are interested in that isn’t one of the big household names.”
The charming von Halle is her own best advert, living in her brand, which now encompasses slip dresses as well as said tracksuits, pretty much 24/7. “I even muck out the horses in OVH,” she says with a laugh. Really? “I wear our pyjamas under a navy boiler suit I bought from our local farm shop in Wiltshire. I also like to wear a slip dress with big boots.” The 24-strong head office lives in it too. “It’s by wearing our brand that we work out anything that needs changing. I am always trying to perfect things. That was how I realised that garment labels can be itchy, for example. Now all our labels are silk too.”
Von Halle also regularly tweaks details such as the height of a waistband or the length of a hem, depending on what is going on in fashion more generally. And, as a mother of three, it’s important to her that all OVH can be washed in the machine, provided you use a specialist silk laundry liquid. “You can even put your pyjamas on at a higher temperature if they are stained. I have to do that all the time as my children like to use me as a human napkin.” Keeping it real, one pair of 600 quid jimjams at a time.
