And your tropical body wonders: what kind of climate is this?

I THINK I have been used to wearing jackets since the junior high years. But my memory fails me about how I first began using jackets. It seems that I acquired the habit influenced by the trend of making T-shirts, jackets, and other pieces of clothing displaying some youth identity, which was very popular in Indonesia during the nineties. In the second year of my time at the senior high school, I already had a class T-shirt. In the third year, I had a class jacket. This was how it looked: it was a parachute jacket, with brownish green color on the front and back, with bone white sleeves. On the back was a sentence in silver, proclaiming “Masyarakat 3-I Jujur Penuh Ambisi di Mana-mana” (literally: the class of 3-I is full of ambition everywhere). To this day, I cannot remember who came up with the sentence, and how come everybody in the class—me included—could agree that such a bombastic sentence was to be printed on our class jacket.

There was no consensus about when the class jacket should be worn, but usually we wore them during school events, or when we went to school or came back home. In my case, as I had been going to school on my motorbike since the second year, I always felt the need to wear a jacket to protect me from the wind and the piercing sun.

Having been born and grew up in Surabaya, a city known as the port city and one with sweltering weather, I responded to the environment by covering my body. The concept of ‘protecting the body’ was in keeping with the newly-acquired habit of wearing the class jacket.

The jacket eventually became a part of myself and my daily wear. It served as a must-have outer costume. However, as I still understood the jacket as a functional product, I stuck to wearing the same old jackets. It was only after I graduated from high school that I acquired the awareness to match the jacket with the other clothing items (T-shirts, shirts, pants). As from the kindergarten on to the senior high school years I studied in public schools that obliged the students to wear uniforms, the time in the weekends when I could use clothes other than the uniforms—or the clothes that we called “the free clothes”—was seen as an opportunity to express my personal style after having been ‘restricted’ in uniforms during the weekdays. The awareness to become fashionable, or the wish to become someone with a personal sense of fashion, perhaps came to being only after I no longer used uniforms. Added to that was the fact that I went out more frequently, and thus the jacket became a clothing item that I collected. The number of jackets I had grew accordingly.

The habit of wearing jackets grew to be something quite extreme. My sensitivity toward the thickness of the clothing material lessened. What I considered as important when I bought a jacket were the color and the model. Because in general people in the tropics are rather “heat resistant” (i.e. used to the hot weather), thick jackets are not considered a problem. The stifling heat caused by the use of jacket is not seen as a problem, either. The blasé attitude regarding jacket usage also concerns the clothing items used inside the jacket. T-shirts with rather thick materials and turtle necks as well as sweaters had also been parts of my daily wear during the mid-nineties to the end of the nineties.

Unlike me, who tended to respond to the hot climate with body-covering clothes, Ani (33), who grew up in Yogyakarta also amid the stifling climate, tended to submit to the weather. I view Ani’s submission simply as an act of yielding to the existing weather. When the weather is cold, use thick clothes; when it’s hot, use soft and thin clothes.

Ani, therefore, views jackets differently. She thinks that the jacket is a piece of clothing to be worn during the night and serves to protect the body from the cold. During the day, she thinks that there is no reason to wear jackets. “I’m used to walking a lot and riding the motorbike without the jacket,” she says. Since she was little, she has never had the habit of wearing jackets. Members of her family attested that she never liked it whenever she was asked to wear a jacket.

Meanwhile, the jacket for me has progressed from being a piece of clothing worn to protect the skin to become one that completed my appearance and made me feel comfortable. The jacket became a favorite item of clothing because it was in keeping with the need to protect the skin from the piercing heat.

Underlined with the need to protect one’s body from the piercing sun has been the desire to keep the skin light. I myself am not too much obsessed with the desire to be light-colored, although admittedly from time to time there is some apprehension of facing such comments as “Gee, you’re rather dark now, aren’t you?” Ani, on the other hand, likes dark skin, and even deliberately darkens her skin when she goes to the beach. “I feel rather annoyed if I see someone going to the beach with a jacket and face covering.”

The jacket, I think, is also in keeping with the personal policy of not wearing sleeveless clothes or those with a plunging neckline. It is such attitude towards the body—which might have been influenced by religious ideology of what is considered proper as taught by parents and further enforced in the community, as well as by a certain lifestyle, for example—that is seen as having a significant role that affects how we dress. To me, the jacket is something that ‘completes’ me.

As we talk about the relationship between clothes and values and ideology, then the most honest response about, say, the Islamic veil—if impropriety is signified by how one reveals parts of the body, then the Islamic dress can be categorized as the most proper fashion—is reflected by expressions on the street and other public spaces that one might encounter when there is a chance meeting with those who have decided to wear the veil or burqah. On a tricycle with my sister who was just enrolled at the IPB (Bogor Agricultural Institute) in 1990 and decided to wear the long veil, I noticed how motorbike riders and people on the street often greeted her, “Assalamualaikum, Sister!” Then there are also comments like this: “Doesn’t she feel stifled inside such black burqah? Does she perhaps have a small fan inside the burqah?”

When the veil appeared and introduced the concept of a near-complete cover of the body to the monotonous fashion landscape—monotonous in the sense that the clothes generally cover the same old parts of the body—it became something subversive, something that disturbed and intrigued people, inciting such comments as the ones I mentioned above. The religious faith clashed with the realistic responses toward the weather and the existing fashion environment.

For Ani, however, as the jacket has never been a part of her fashion pattern, she feels no attachment toward it. She even thinks that the jacket does not suit her because she always wants to appear neat. The jacket becomes a source of irritation as it tends to create creases around her collars or on the shirts that she is wearing, and makes the sleeves look crumpled. The jacket also bothers Ani because it smothers her. Ani said, “The jacket makes me feel cramped. Perhaps this is akin to my dislike of wearing shoes and socks.” For her, the most fitting excuse to wear jacket is found only when she wears clothes with very thin materials or with holes—but that is also because she uses the motorbike as her main mode of transportation.

Transportation constitutes a determining factor in our fashion-related decision. On an open vehicle such as the bike, the bike-rider becomes a walking (or riding) object that must be prepared to face the glare and gaze of other bikers, citizens, and other users of the public spaces along the way. Living in a society in which the members are used to comment on the things that others are doing means also the readiness to accept comments and any kind of reactions by others regarding the clothes we wear. Ani told me that she, too, always feels uncomfortable if she is wearing tank tops and riding her bike on the street, facing the glare and naughty whistles from other road users. “It’s better when you ride the motorbike, as it’s faster. But if you’re on your pushbike, you have to face the glare longer.” Still, she does not care much about it.

As she came back to Indonesia in 2007 after having studied in the Netherlands and done a research project in South Africa for eighteen months, Ani saw that she now had a greater range of sleeveless clothing items. Her experience of living abroad has sharpened her attitude toward clothes. In a four-season country like the Netherlands, she became acutely aware of the kind of clothes she should wear in response to the weather. While doing her research at the Mamelodi Township near Pretoria, South Africa, her response toward the piercing sun by using sleeveless clothes became further strengthened. “While I was there, sometimes I wore clothes with sleeves, simply to protect myself from the dusts. But everybody else then commented, ‘Ani, please don’t wear long sleeves. I feel stifled only by looking at you.’ Indeed, the sunshine was quite intense there; so, we always felt stifled.”

In the past, I did not understand why my friends asked me questions and looked at me rather strangely every time I wore a jacket on a hot day; or why some could not understand motorbike riders who equipped themselves with supercomplete protecting clothes: scarves to protect the face, glasses, and gloves. Now, the experience living in a country with a totally different climate from Indonesia enabled me to understand such bewilderment.

To foreigners living or visiting Indonesia, the sun might constitute a blessing for which one should always be grateful. Residents of tropical lands, however, respond differently to the sun, affected by their attitude regarding clothes, heat, coolness, body politics, ideology, skin colors, as well as the different experiences when confronted by contrastingly different kinds of weather. These are all the factors that define the differences in the clothing strategy employed by people in residing in a place with the same weather.

As I came home from the Netherlands after having lived there for a year, my clothing style changed. I no longer use thick jackets, thick T-shirts, and sweaters. I still cannot live without layered clothes, however, because for me there are still reasons why I should have a protecting outer layer. The sun is sometimes too piercing for the skin and the air is too polluted by fumes and your clothes run the risk of smelling like the car exhaust. Today, however, I replace the jacket with a thin cardigan. One thing is sure: my sensitivity toward the clothing material has sharpened.

As I reconsider people’s clothing habits so far, I think that as one wears one’s clothes, there is always an element of ‘leisure’ apart from ‘utility’. As one develops and experiments with the style, the use of scarves—an element of clothing considered out of place in the tropics—often draws mockery and bewilderment. Perhaps, subconsciously, there is a zest to experiment and try ‘different’ clothes, the ‘winter-style clothing’.

As I rode my motorbike and stopped at a traffic lamp on a busy street one morning, I looked at other riders, other users of the public space, and observed the costumes they wore: a young woman was wearing her jacket back-to-front, perhaps expecting the sleeves to be protecting her arms and the back of her hands better; then there are those who held the handlebars with their palms upwards (again, with the hope that the back of their hands would not get sun-burnt); or those who wore complicated clothing when riding their bikes (scarves to cover the face, glasses to protect the eyes from the dust, gloves—at night, the glasses and gloves might be taken off, replaced with another form of protection: the wind-resistant waistcoat). The street is a stage that openly displays how the residents negotiate with the weather.




Yogyakarta, July 2009
Translated by Rani Elsanti




NURAINI JULIASTUTI studied sociology at Airlangga University, Surabaya, before deciding to move and study Communications at the Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. With Antariksa, she established KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in 1999. She also writes about the arts and culture in a variety of printed media such as Tempo, Kompas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal, Karbonjournal.org, Jurnal Lebur, and a range of art catalogues published by galleries in Indonesia and abroad. She also assists the “Aksara” program of art writing at the Cemeti Art Foundation and teaches part time at the Department of Communication, Islamic University of Indonesia. In 2007, she went to the Netherlands to study Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is now back in Yogyakarta and conducts an experimental research project on media and technology for KUNCI.