Tuesday, Oct. 20 2009 @ 4:11PM
Andrew Burleson hates wearing dress clothes. He also believes this cultural hangover from our distant European ancestry costs too much money, is completely illogical and ruins much of Houston's social life for about half of the year.
"In the summer if you're dressed for work and you go outside it's just murder," says Burleson, an urban designer and real estate consultant and
blogger. "Then you go home and change into something that's more appropriate, it's still hot but it's not nearly as bad. So on a weekend I can enjoy going to Discovery Green or on a walk somewhere outside, but not during the week."
As we all know, Houston is famously a city where you can see lots of people not enjoying themselves downtown on a daily basis. Especially during the work week in the summer months, those few that venture on the street for any length of time end up a sweaty mess, so most don't bother. Instead, workers stick to the tunnels and skywalks and stay fast in the embrace of air-conditioned comfort. But since the tunnels close around seven, Houston's downtown empties each day at closing time, and on weekends, the whole district save for a few bars and nightclubs is a virtual ghost town.
Unthinkingly, we've sacrificed our civic center on the altar of conformity to fashions developed long ago in much cooler countries. Another of the more obvious results is very high energy bills. Houston has long been known as "the most air-conditioned city on Earth" for a reason.
Burleson points out, and research bears him out, that women feel cooler than men. Thus we have the absurdity of women needing to take sweaters to work or play with them on days when the heat index tops 100. "We'll go to the movies, church or a restaurant and she will feel like she has to take a change of clothes with her, because she'll be really hot on the way, and then we'll get to the theater or whatever and go inside and she's freezing to death," says Burleson. "She can't sit there and enjoy the movies because she's freezing so hard."
To Burleson, our attachment to dress clothes is not just costly and a pain in the ass, but utterly unreasonable: Here on the cusp of the Tropics, why must we dress as if we are beset daily by cool London fogs?
"We get our fashion sense from Northern Europe, and it comes down to the rest of the U.S.," he says. "Our seasons are linked to that. In September, they start selling sweaters here. Are you kiddin' me?"
"Let's live like it's hot 'cause it is," he says. "Let's live in the place that we're at and learn to embrace it."
Ergo "Dress For The Weather Week."