The Shrinking Fashion Grammar of a Very Hot Summer

At some point this summer, I realised I was no longer looking at outfits (a long-time hobby of a fashion freak), I was watching negotiations. Between skin and asphalt, dignity and humidity, personal style and desperately needing some air to move close to the skin. Fashion, usually so eager to announce, had become quieter and much lazier to speak.

This is the kind of thing one starts noticing after years of researching and writing about fashion. You develop an inconvenient eye for the moments when it performs beautifully, but also for the moments when it fails, retreats, mutates, or gets interrupted by reality. And very harsh heat is a rude interrupter. It does not care about tribes, origins, references, collection logic or archival moods. Heat makes the whole symbolic architecture of dress secondary, and we only end up asking the most primitive of questions: is the human coping?

Courtesy of Stefania Danese, Launchmetrics

The body interrupts

Fashion is a language, one of the most efficient semiotic systems we have. It operates before we even open our mouths, and especially when we stay silent. In this intricate system, dress — or more specifically clothes, jewellery, even body adornments — announces taste, class, profession, gender, rebellion, money, restraint, availability, refusal, nostalgia and many other scandalously loud or whispering agendas. This is why we keep reading, either consciously or not. And believe me, you ARE in the book club even if you publicly denounce the fashion game.

But clothing has another function next to being part of the fashion vocabulary. It shields the body, negotiates with the elements, temperature, movement, and psychology. The most interesting performance happens somewhere between these two functions: protection and communication, utility and sign, body and culture. The trouble begins when one side of the equation starts to falter. In extreme heat, communication does not disappear, but the signalling through the variation and layering of clothes becomes harder, almost conditional. Or as a friend who recently attended Paris Fashion Week very strikingly confessed, "How do you signal business, being in the know, when you only have three pieces of clothing to use!" And even though we saw the high performers of fashion suffering through the days in latex, leather and PVC shoes no matter what, the general mood of the people was still survival first, expression second.

Photographed by Phil Oh

That is why the street during a heatwave can look flattened, even when people are still technically (almost) dressed. The minimalist is still a minimalist, the metal dude is still metal, the punk is still punk, the fashionista is still making an effort, but it has all been edited, diluted to such an extent that we can almost call it homeopathic. The codes remain, but they carry less information. Not to mention the fact that we just have less brain power to use in the assemblage of our looks. Fashion has not died, but it is rather dizzy from too much sun.

Cold is easier to us

There is a reason colder climates have produced such a smug idea of fashion seriousness. I say this with affection, and also as someone who has benefited from it. European and North American fashion criticism, the designers and the humans on the streets have always had a magnificent toolbox: we are spoiled for choice when it comes to layers, materials, an archive of clothing items, friction between inside and outside. Cold gives us a wide vocabulary of signs to use and decode, universes to build. The meanings can be broadcast loudly through posters, rather than the slip of paper you find inside a fortune cookie.

Courtesy of Thom Browne

In the Nordics, this climatic confidence becomes even more specific. Dressing has long meant negotiating with darkness, wind, slush, snow and the fun experience of being covered in wool most of the year, so we learned to treat complexity as a kind of intelligence. Heat is less generous. It removes tools, reduces surface, punishes layering and makes structure feel hostile. It leaves more skin and less garment, more body and less construction, and definitely fewer big dramatic gestures. For years, from the climatic comfort of having so much fabric to discuss, it was easy to look at hot-climate fashion weeks (and streets) with a slightly raised eyebrow. São Paulo, for example, often reached us as a relentless sequence of beachwear, bodies, cut-outs, colour, and more bodies. We knew it was a different fashion system, but I am not sure we always read and approached it with kindness.

Perhaps we mistook a smaller climatic toolbox for a smaller imagination. That now feels like a useful correction, because the joke is slowly turning on us. Our own means are shrinking too. Not everywhere, not all year, not in the same way, but enough to feel the grammar change. The old emotional calendar of Northern dressing — summer ease, autumn polish, winter drama, spring relief — no longer behaves with the same discipline. We're soon left with copying our very, very ancient ancestors, as my archaeologist friend reminded me, hanging just a few garments and a hell of a lot of trophies on our bodies so that others can read our stories. Or is there something else entirely coming?

The words reveal the truth

The most honest place in fashion right now may be the product description. The campaign image still clings to the old summer fantasy: linen ease, coastal light, relaxed sensuality, the woman on the terrace who never sweats, carries nothing around, works nowhere and appears to exist in a permanent state of holiday. The image is still selling summer as a mood. The copy, however, has moved on: breathable, cooling, quick-dry, sweat-wicking, UV-protective, temperature-regulating, moisture-managing, airflow-achieving etc.

Courtesy of Pitti Uomo

This is no longer the language of seduction, but the language of bodily management that promises relief instead of transformation. The campaign says: you will be free, beautiful, effortless, somewhere else. The product copy says: you will make it through the afternoon without boiling. For someone with a communication background, this split is absurdly interesting. The visual system still performs the old dream, while the verbal system has admitted that we have a problem. Marketing is less sentimental than fashion imagery because it follows pain points, not ideals. If consumers search for something to help with the heat, brands say cooling. If people are worried about sweat, brands say moisture-wicking. If the sun is not viewed as romantic, but aggressive, brands say UV protection. The copy has no need to protect the mythology of summer, it only needs to move product, and in doing that it accidentally tells the truth.

High street retail has also jumped on the bandwagon. Behind the scenes, companies are being forced to rethink stock, calendars, supply chains, forecasting and the increasingly unstable seasons. H&M has talked about extending the summer season and designing lighter autumn assortments because customers are still buying warm-weather clothing later into the year. Mango has talked about climate change making fashion less seasonal and pushing demand toward more adaptable garments. None of this is poetic, and that's why it matters. Retail does not need to believe in the long tirades of the climate change scientist — it has its own evidence to prove it, it has receipts.

Courtesy of Mango

Some laboratory action

It would be untrue to claim that all fashion is stunned by the heat, that it's not fighting back. It IS innovating; it is just not always happening in the places the system likes to mythologise first.

Definitely not the maisons (it hasn't for a long time), not even the streets. You have to dig deep into sports science, workwear, fibre development, logistics, performance claims and the unglamorous zones where the body is treated not as an image, but as a physical problem. And then look for the curious connections, the borrowing machine that is human creativity.

Japanese fan-assisted jackets are a perfect example because they reverse the usual hierarchy. Developed for construction workers, farmers, traffic controllers and other people whose bodies are oblivious to the concepts of fashion, these garments use small battery-powered fans to circulate air inside clothing and help sweat evaporate. The idea is brutally sensible: do not cool the building, cool the person. The same goes for the little handheld or attachable fans that start to look more like jewellery every day.

Fashion often imagines itself as the first to sense the future, but historically it has mostly followed necessity and made it socially desirable. Denim came from workwear, trench coats from military rainwear, parkas from Arctic survival, sneakers from sport, technical shells from mountaineering. Fashion rarely invents necessity, but is really good at translating it, using it as a tool for uniting and dividing, eroticising it. And when it comes to the industry, charging big amounts of money for it.

The overheated body problem

Sportswear has understood the overheated body with more precision than most fashion imagery has. Nike's advanced performance systems map the body and design around movement, sweat, heat and sport-specific needs. Adidas has developed cooling systems for footballers facing extreme tournament conditions. Columbia, Under Armour and others have built entire vocabularies around cooling, sweat activation, heat dispersal, airflow and quick drying. Some of it is serious engineering, some of it is branding, yet the direction is clear: these garments begin with physiology, not semiotics.

Courtesy of Adidas

Uniqlo's AIRism may be the most culturally interesting example because it is visually utterly unglamorous. It turns basics and underwear into microclimate management. No grand silhouette, no conceptual declaration, no runway moment; just a layer promising comfort and relief. Climate-adaptive clothing does not always look like sci-fi; sometimes it's a multipack. Fashion has not yet made this shift visually satisfying: much of the relevant innovation is hidden, underlayered, technical, almost anti-image. It gives the body what it needs, but the public has very little to analyse.

Preparedness becomes style

This is where gorpcore becomes useful, not as climate-proofing, but as cultural precedent. The point is not that climate change made urban people wear Salomon trail shoes to cafés, but rather the fact that technical readiness has become socially legible. Arc'teryx shells (I was shocked to see one of my friends wear one for an actual sporting event), trail shoes, technical bags and hiking-derived silhouettes have moved from specialist environments into cities, offices and galleries where nobody intended to climb anything. It was easy to mock, because there is something truly funny about people dressing for hard terrain they may never meet. But it normalised an important idea: preparedness can be a look.

Courtesy of Rick Owens

That matters because once the climate becomes less stable, preparedness stops being a niche identity and starts becoming a general condition of living. The old fashion fantasy often relied on a quirky carelessness (at least for the last quarter of a century): the wrong shoe, the fragile fabric, the tiny bag, the jacket that protects only your ego. These things will probably not disappear (fashion would rather perish than become entirely reasonable), but they will have to compete with a new desirability: being equipped, not defeated by weather, and able to move through the day while still saying something. We are yet to learn how to do that, of course. Some guidance from the recent Rick Owens x Adidas collaboration might be useful — we're back to the topic of fan-assisted garments, which did look quite appealing in the 40+ weather of Paris in late June. We might even see reflections of this on the streets, as Owens is one of the few designers still mastering the trickle-down effect.

A need for new literacy

The real question is not whether fashion will adapt — it will. It is vain, inventive, commercial and human enough to survive almost anything, including its many previous declared deaths. The more interesting question is what happens in the lag, while the body, the product copy, the retailer and the sports lab have already accepted a reality that fashion imagery has not yet fully translated.

Heat does not only change garments, it changes what garments are able to say and how much they can carry while saying it. The signs themselves start meaning something else. Showing skin becomes less erotic or rebellious and more thermoregulatory. A loose dress stops being bohemian and states airflow. Sandals stop declaring holiday vibes and start saying feet must survive. That is a stranger problem than "people dress lighter when it is hot." It suggests climate change is not just altering fashion as a product, but fashion as language — both the volume of the signal and what the signal now stands for. The medium itself is under pressure. Clothes still speak, but in heat they speak through fewer tools, in a changed vocabulary, under stricter bodily conditions.

It is an embarrassing truth that the 30 and 40+ degrees of recent years have reminded us that fashion was never as independent from the physically functioning body as it likes to pretend. It has manipulated the body, put some of it on a pedestal, hidden most of it — but for a long time now, it has lost the actual connection to the primitive. We have had it too comfy even in the Nordic blizzards.

Photographer by Phil Oh

Perhaps we need to learn a different way of reading fashion under heat, and performing it: one that does not confuse fewer garments with fewer ideas, or adaptation with surrender. One more attentive to the compressed intelligence of dressing when the body has fewer tolerances. Hot-climate fashion may have understood this all along; we were simply too busy in layers to notice.

Before clothes can be signs, they are surfaces against skin. That doesn't mean we give up as cultural beings and all wear the same f****** uniform linen shirt or a frilly dress. We have to find the skills to make new meaning, beauty, tension and desire under heat. We have to learn how to fashion, how to sign again — an interesting task, even as I plan my own relocation to Iceland, the final frontier for cold-seeking, Viking-blooded fashion critics.

Written by  Ester Kannelmäe