By Nazlan Ertan
In Turkey, çubuklu pijama, or striped pajamas, means much more than bedtime. It’s the uniform of the “baba”: the modest patriarch who comes home, trades his jacket for cotton stripes, and settles in front of the evening news. A garment of thrift and decency, it once stood for the steady comfort of the lower middle class.
That image flipped last week, when the Confederation of Public Employees turned up before Parliament, where they shed their jackets and displayed striped pajamas. “We have only our jackets left,” said one. “You’ve left us with nothing but pajamas,” said another. The protest came after weeks of frustration over the government’s offer of single-digit pay rises for 2026 and 2027, rates that would leave most public servants earning well below the poverty line amid soaring inflation and rising rents. The scene was equal parts absurd and eloquent: the sleepwear of obedience repurposed as a costume of defiance.
SUMERBANK AND CINEMA
The symbolism runs deep. For half a century, the state-run textile company Sümerbank clothed Turkey’s citizens in flannel, selling striped sets that became as common as enamel mugs. To wear them was to be respectable and yerli malı, patriotically local. When Sümerbank collapsed during the wave of privatizations in the 1990s, their pajamas vanished from shop windows but not from memory. They remained shorthand for an era of quiet order and earned simplicity, neither luxury nor poverty, but the fabric of ordinary respectability. In 2000, Marks and Spencer offered some of these lovely stripes to Turkish customers and nowadays, Turkish chic boutique has a modernized version, with muted pastel stripe bottoms under a smooth white tee.
In pop culture, the striped pajama belongs to the weary yet dignified fathers of TV shows such as “Bizimkiler” or “Perihan Abla”—men who never rebelled, never risked, and never left their living rooms. That’s why seeing it on the steps of Parliament felt almost cinematic, like a Yeşilçam satire where the most dutiful citizens finally walk out in their house clothes to say “enough is enough.”
VESTS AND HOODIES
Elsewhere, protest movements have claimed their own uniforms—the yellow vests of French drivers, the black hoodies of Hong Kong youth. Turkey’s contribution may be softer but just as pointed: flannel stripes that once signaled conformity now stitched into a portrait of quiet rebellion.
Once the fabric of modest comfort, the çubuklu pijama has reemerged as a wry protest uniform. A relic of state industry and homegrown pride, it now wraps a different kind of patriotism: the kind that demands to be seen, even in its pajamas, and paid adequately.
