Too Hot or Too Cold: A History of Inappropriate Dressing
This is ‘book’ 14 in the series The Impossible Books of Keith Kahn-Harris. The cover was created by Gus Condeixa. For more on this series, read the introduction here.
What sort of book is it?
A cultural history, scholarly yet accessible to the general reader.
How likely is it that I will write the book?
Very very unlikely. I might pursue some of the ideas in an article or two though.
Am I happy for anyone else to write the book?
I’d love someone to write this. In fact, perhaps someone has. I have done some searches and there doesn’t seem to be a book written on exactly these lines, but the ideas in it may well have been pursued in the literature on fashion, clothing etc. I may well be unknowingly replicating arguments that many other people have made.
Synopsis
The starting point for this book lies in a somewhat puerile obsession of mine with people who are not dressed correctly for the weather. Here are a couple of highlights from this obsession:
Twenty years ago, on a flight from the UK to Israel, I developed an irrational hatred of an Australian guy on the flight. He was an Australian uber-backpacker; the kind of guy who would drone on and on about how he was a ‘traveller’, about his deep connection with the locals, about how he has been travelling for 5 years on only $1 a day. He picked a conversation with everyone, in the way that permanent travellers often do to disguise their own profound loneliness.
My irrational hate for him was rewarded when we reached Tel Aviv. We arrived after midnight in December. It was cold, no more than 10 degrees at most. Yet my traveller friend was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Clearly, he must have believed Israel was always hot — an idiotic assumption that undermined his claims of deep connection with the earth. Yet I had to admit to a grudging admiration: he didn’t seem to be shivering.
The second highlight in my obsession with the incorrectly dressed, occurred just a couple of years ago. I was driving my children to school on a scorching July day. It was well over 20 degrees at 8:15 and the temperature was predicted to hit 30 later on. Yet we passed a 14/15 year old boy walking to school. He wore a jumper, blazer and a thick winter coat. Two days later, I gave a talk at a synagogue in Central London. It was over 30 degrees and I had agonised whether it was appropriate to wear shorts or not, finally settling on cool linen trousers and a short sleeve shirt. Yet most of the people at the synagogue were wearing fleeces, jumpers and — in the case of the rabbi — a body warmer zipped right up to the neck.
As with the traveller, my reaction to the teenager and the synagogue members was a strange mixture of contempt and awe.
Why do people who dress inappropriately for the weather provoke such strong emotions in me? It’s partly because I cannot personally stand being too hot or too cold. It’s partly because I feel a certain envy of the ability to be impervious to the climate. But it’s also because I simply cannot understand it. Why would you want to be too hot or too cold?
For a while now I’ve toyed with starting a tumblr blog or similar, and posting photos of particularly fine examples of the inappropriately dressed. I guess it would have been light-hearted, gently-mocking in tone. However, I recently stumbled up an article that made me rethink my interest in inappropriate dressing:
The article shamed me and reminded me of two things: First, in some cases at least, to point out or ridicule what someone wears can be a threatening and even abusive act. [I note here that the overdressed teenager was black and that the overdressed synagogue members were predominantly gay and lesbian, raising uncomfortable questions about my own prejudices.] Second, it isn’t good enough simply to highlight and mock inappropriate dressing; there are fascinating issues here about how human beings present themselves to the world, questions about identity and the body.
So, in a kind of mea culpa for the puerility and unpleasantness of my obsession, I’ve tried to think through how what inappropriate dressing really means.
There are certainly plenty of examples of inappropriate dressing: ultra-orthodox Jews wearing winter coats during the Israeli summer; imperial Indian administrators in impeccable uniforms, their wives stifled in starch and corsets; Norwegian black metal musicians posing shirtless in the snow; Roman soldiers wearing tunics on Hadrian’s Wall; Oasis playing in full-length anoraks at the Glastonbury Festival; Newcastle football fans wearing t-shirts in midwinter; indigenous near-naked residents of the Amazon shivering round fires in the rainy season.
I’m sure there are many more examples. Perhaps even inappropriate dressing is the rule rather than the exception? There is certainly plenty of scope for research on the matter.
[Of course, I am deliberately excluding instances where appropriate clothing has been unavailable. For example, I am aware that gloves were only owned by the rich up until relatively recently, and even the gloves that did exist would never have been able to deal with the coldest weather.]
What does it all mean though? Why do human beings so often dress in ways that make them too hot or too cold?
In the book Too Hot or Too Cold I want to test a hypothesis: That, more often than not, clothing is less about protection from the elements so much as defiance of them.
What I mean by this is that humans use clothing as much as a way to distinguish themselves from the ‘natural’ environment as they do to adapt to it. To wear clothes is to make a statement about identity — that much is, of course, hardly a novel argument — but an identity that is founded as much as anything else on the implicit statement: ‘I am who I am despite everything, despite the weather. I endure despite the physical world. I am self-created, not a creature of the material world.’
So my traveller in Tel Aviv was demonstrating the strength and resilience of his travellerness by dressing for the heat in the cold. The teenager stifling in the heat was demonstrating his budding insouciant masculinity. The bundled up synagogue members were demonstrating that their deliberate neglect of the body would not be swayed by the heat.
Maybe this is all obvious. I would certainly treat this hypothesis lightly in the book. But what I most want to do is to delve into the research — to see just how far the inappropriate-dressing rabbit hole goes. Perhaps no overall narrative explains this deliciously perverse element of human behaviour, but it will certainly be fun to look into it further.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this Impossible Book, why not browse through the rest of the series here?
Also, please recommend and share it on Medium or elsewhere. I would love to read your comments too.
Many thanks!
Finally, here’s an alternative cover:
