Climate change is a fashion disaster
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The great and the good gave it another go this week. Led by Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, a bipartisan group of prominent Americans issued a report aimed at stirring conservative interest in global warming.
The study does its best to scare the right wing, warning of more killer storms, devastating coastal floods and other horrible things unless we do a better job of limiting the emission of greenhouse gases.
But I suspect it will take more than scientific data to unnerve US conservatives who blanch at the mere mention of climate change – and reckon that any warning about the weather is a ruse employed by federal bureaucrats who want to meddle with the private sector.
If environmentalists want to get the right really riled up, they should talk about the fashion implications of global warming. Sure, there are more pressing issues for our planet. But there are few better suited to the political demands of our time.
Let’s face it, if it gets much hotter, people are going to dress differently – and that poses a clear and present danger to the sartorial underpinnings of our traditional American way of life.
Simply put, more heat and more humidity mean less clothing – and maybe no clothing at all, in some circumstances. If conservatives think that our young people dress inappropriately in public places now, imagine just how scantily clad everyone is going to get if Mr Paulson’s report is correct.
By this century’s end, it says, the average American will have to endure 45 to 96 days a year in which the mercury will top 35C. In places such as the great plains of the central US or the southeast, it will be that hot for even longer.
As a result, I would anticipate a fashion situation approximating that of an unexpurgated Britney Spears or Beyoncé music video. Wherever you look, there will be thongs and halter tops, daring decolletage, bared abdomens, buttocks and backs, and exposed flesh of both the male and female variety bathed in sweat – more, in other words, than many of our conservative friends can handle.
Golfers and other summer athletes will have to give up their shirt-and-trouser combinations and dress more like swimmers or those martial artists we see rolling around on the floor together in US television’s Ultimate Fighting Championship.
This could suit svelte competitors along the lines of a Rory McIlroy or a Tiger Woods but I hate to think what will happen as pudgier players of the Kevin Stadler or John Daly ilk bend over their putts.
Nor will semi-nudity remain the province of the young and the restless. The elderly and even the infirm will have to shed clothing in public to avoid being consumed by the heat. As our well-inked millennials age, all those tattoos in relatively private places – of pretty poppies and peacock feathers, Chinese characters and Maori symbols – will wither in full view of subsequent generations, as if they were so many raisins in the sun.
The death knell could even sound for that great symbol of bourgeois rectitude and patriarchal authority: the male necktie. It seems like only yesterday that the well-executed Windsor knots of Ronald Reagan functioned as something of a symbol for the US conservative movement he led. But the neckwear that was fit for a Gipper has fallen on hard times as a new generation of executives has taken to dressing like teenagers.
Further rises in our temperatures could relegate these respectable, but obviously restricting, accessories to the same status as spats or the top hat. Tomorrow’s US alpha male will not be the buttoned-up sort of times gone by. He will bare his chest, and probably wax it as well.
It all adds up to an American fashion disaster of Janet Jackson-wardrobe-malfunction proportions – speaking, of course, from the perspective of our Judaeo-Christian heritage. Americans of all kinds will be showing more skin, in more places, threatening to distract those among us who trying to focus their thoughts on their faith and families.
Of course, none of this proves that the planet is getting warmer. But it raises the stakes for conservatives, and suggests a new way forward for Mr Paulson and his cadre of well-meaning friends in high places.
It’s all well and good for them to trot out more research and call for a carbon tax to limit fossil fuel use. But if they really want to save the world, they should include more pictures in their next report of people shedding their clothes to cope with the sweltering heat. It’s a way to get more clicks online, you know.
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