What are you wearing?

Why do we feel the need to dress differently when we travel? The ‘traveller/tourist’ look is usually very easy to spot - it falls into two broad (and insultingly generalised) categories: The Sensible and The Native. Why does the former get about in chunky, overly practical, asexual synthetics and the latter in baggy cottons, waistcoats and toe-rings?

Sensible doesn’t have to mean you dress like you’re about to climb the Eiger and Native shouldn’t have to include exposed navel and dodgy tattoo.

A mate and I travelled together in Mexico some years ago and he insisted on wearing a very clean white panama hat and cravat everywhere we went - we were assumed to be a nice gay German couple, which was very understandable in hindsight.

Why are ‘normal’ clothes so wrong?

Larry O’leary