And there are (and were) ways to make a wool suit that’s more comfortable in warm weather: use a lightweight fabric, leave the back of the jacket unlined.
ISTR reading somewhere that above a certain temperature/sunlight level, clothing like the traditional Arab kind actually keeps you more comfortable, as it’s something like insulation against the sun and heat. Apparently it’s pretty loose-fitting, so there’s lots of airflow, but not much of you is exposed.
Hasidic Jewish men still dress this way year-round - even in Israel.
According to something I read by Frederick Forsyth, since Roman times the average weight carried by soldiers had averaged 60 lbs., daily marches 16 miles. That would make a difference while wearing a heavy wool coat.
Yes, it’s like your clothes are fanning you.
Maybe not when that particular photo was taken, but the OP’s point is that men used to wear suits everywhere - regardless of season, you wouldn’t see men wearing suits in the bleachers at a ball game today.
I confess I’m a bit perplexed. I’m old enough to remember when men wore suits most of the time, but it does seem like an awful burden in summer, pre-AC. Fans, lightweight material, and a stiff upper lip got people through, I guess?
Wow. You have completely missed my point.
Never mind.
When researching a historical article about a local movie theatre that had previously been a vaudeville house, I found that there had been an upstairs room for ice blocks and fans to provide a cool draft descending through the building. So, not just places like the White House were ice-cooled before there was air-conditioning, but even neighborhood theatres in small towns.
Officers of the Royal Navy could wear “Red Sea rig” to formal-dress events while serving in the Near East: black-tie attire with a red bow tie, red cummerbund, and no jacket.
Yep. I still remember being surprised when I encountered that in an early issue of Spider-Man as a kid. Aunt May was worried about Peter catching a chill and suggested he switch to his winter-weight suit. Pete, in the early issues, always rocked a blue 2-piece suit with yellow sweater-vest and a tie. You know, like most high school freshmen.
How did this work? I mean to say, there ain’t no ice in the Potomac in August so wouldn’t the ice from February have long since melted by the summer? I 've never really understood the concept of ice houses–in the summertime, ice melts.
3 posts were merged into an existing topic: How Ice Houses worked. A Linked reply from the suits thread
People must have acclimated to the heat, and then slowed way down in activity. I have read numerous books about the civil war and many of those plantation owners remarked that it “would be impossible for white people to work in cotton fields in the sultry southern heat” I do not know how people got any work done in the south in summer,… I LOVE ac!
As a teenager in the early 1960s, I worked in a London pub and we had ice delivered two or three times a week during the summer. The delivery truck was open-backed and the ice was covered with sacking. The driver and his mate used sharp hooks to lift the blocks and slide them down into the cellar.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to convert H2O from a solid to a liquid.
I’m gonna need AC when I move down from elevation. Currently 46F outside 66 inside. I’m in shorts. Just got back from talking to a neighbor outside.
You can adjust to cold as well as heat it seems.
It doesn’t melt all at once.
You can try the experiment yourself. Take a single ice cube and lay it out on the sun next to a pile of ice cubes. Do both sides run out of ice at the same time?
Now take even more ice (like big honking sheets of it) and store it in a basement and keep the sun off it, and it lasts even longer. Sure, some of it melts. And sure, it doesn’t necessarily last the entire summer (especially really hot ones). But stock them up, and there’s a good chance of having some left over by the time things cool.
As to the thread, people sweat and the smell was incredible. Sure, there was some acclimatization, but ultimately it was hot and they just dealt with it.
I recall recently reading about JFKs moon speech, which he gave in Houston in mid-September at a football stadium. While some parts of the country might start cooling by mid-September, it was still reportedly about 90 degrees that day and some other people on the stand (all wearing suits of course) said they were all sweating profusely, some through their clothes. It was not any more pleasant in the audience with less airflow and crowded by other people, except perhaps for a few who were in the shade.
When I volunteered in Vietnam one December, it was a drizzly day in the mid-70s F. I was delighted because that was at least 16° cooler than the day before. The student who escorted me to the university shivered in her down parka wirh the hood up and apologized for the freezing cold. The driver had the heat on. When I worked in the Middle East, I only had a fan and my classrooms only had windows. You acclimate.
It’s one of history’s ironies that the global economy was developed by dour, Protestant Britons and Dutchmen who adopted drab, heavy business suits during the Little Ice Age. And because the attire reflected a moral philosophy as much as an adaptation to local climate, the agents of that global economy out in the warmer places where the desired goods could be obtained had to dress the same as the chiefs back in the cold.
While suits were much more common back in the day, it varied. I was once talking with a colleague, and when I told him that my late father always wore a tie and usually a jacket to work in his diner, the colleague said that his father only wore a suit on a few occasions like church and weddings. FWIW his father was a union laborer in Detroit, so there may have been more strict identification with being labor and not management.
Watching historical movies, like Gettysburg, an excellent, but long depiction of the battle, I am amazed that all the generals and other commanders and even the soldiers, were wearing heavy wool uniforms and coats.
A very hot 3 days in early July. No one takes their coat, or shirt, or boots, off. They are wearing 20 pounds of clothing and must stay in uniform.