Dressing Appropriately When Addressing Weather-Related Problems

Whether you are a chancellor, a margravine, a princess, a duchess, a canoness or queen, you are likely to be aware of the necessity to dress appropriately when addressing weather-related problems.

Dressing like Diana is likely to help you catch the attention of superficial photographers and fashion reporters yet such a strategy is unlikely to attract serious science reporters, or serious political reporters.

What is your acquaintance with Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt and her sister Frederike Charlotte?

To whom do you usually address letters regarding physics and philosophy? 

If you prefer a simple life, whether in a secular or spiritual or secular-spiritual way, how you choose to dress for imaginative portraits of yourself is unlikely to compare accurately with how you choose to portray yourself as a scientist, a philosopher and as an activist.

Fashion is a uniform, in much the same way as other uniforms.  Science, philosophy and activism do not require uniformity.  They require accurate insight and quality communication regarding that insight.

While you may or may not have much experience as a princess-abbess and as a secular canoness, you may or may not have much experience in the education of persons of any age, either.

Educating politicians is a particularly difficult occupation.  Such students are often inattentive to the essential lessons associated with the scientific and philosophical curriculum.

Beliefs and opinions often form obstacles to accurate insight, and to quality communication of every sort.

Who listens to you, and why do they do so?

Who reads your science-related notes and philosophical assessments?

How much political power do you possess, and who has supplied you with it?

How much scientific and philosophical knowledge do you possess, and who supplied it to you?

What, for example, is your knowledge of water catchments in the context of global warming?

And what do you know about the appropriate design of clothing, housing and gardens in the context of weather extremes?

How should artists paint the past, the present and the future?

How should artworks, textiles, libraries, archives and people be protected from potentially damaging events?

These are questions every politician should address appropriately.  Unfortunately, most do not.

How do you address the problems and the politicians?

Perhaps you regard politicians as the main problem.

Although the receipt of a good education is everyone's right, such an education also reflects a responsibility towards persons whose rights have been ignored or denied by narcissistic politicians.

What is your acquaintance with the history and purpose of a compass?

How do you usually assess cardinal directions and how do you dress whilst doing so? 

How do you calculate the size of spheres, including the public sphere and the private sphere?

What do you do when your dwelling burns down in a heatwave or fills with mud after a downpour, and what do you wear in such circumstances?

Calculating risks, including the risk of inelegance, requires mathematical accuracy, with or without a tape measure, a compass or a suitably large supercomputer.

Yet all the variables of human influence do not readily assist the risk assessment process, regardless of the calculating power available.

Surveying environmental damage is an unpleasant occupation, in much the same way as examining injuries, counting the dead, and attempting to identify mortal remains.

Do you usually assess damage with your eyes, your ears, your nose, your heart or your brain?

Do you regard mathematics as a normal pursuit or an odd one?

Perhaps you only calculate numbers in relation to money.

Perhaps you only assess damage in terms of money.

While you are unlikely to be a Lutheran princess of the Holy Roman Empire, and unlikely to have responsibility to rule over a territory and imperial abbey, you are likely to have a responsibility to influence public policy, whether you regard yourself as a politician or not.

Every decision contributing to changes in other people's lives is a political decision, whether the changes are improvements or otherwise.

Political decision-making is rarely an expression of wisdom.  Democracies are much the same as running a Lutheran abbey with a new yet much older and strictly Calvinist coadjutor.

Are you acquainted with Princess Christina Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel?

Overly enthusiastic persons can often cause problems when political decisions are required, as can apathetic ones.

Similarly, an excessive desire for camaraderie tends to encourage people to gather in groups for no reason at all when important decisions are required. 

While clarity of vision and realistic images are necessary when assessing facts and addressing problems, incompetent politicians act as if they always view the world through a camera obscura, and not as it really exists.  

Perhaps that is why they communicate through obscurantism.

Images, however accurate, are not reality.

Messages, however obscure, may or may not reflect reality accurately.

It is easy to confuse one thing with another when clarity is absent. 

How do you compare Herford and Hereford?

How do you compare one building with another?

How do you compare one map with another?

How do you compare one community with another?

How do you compare one environment with another?

How do you compare one household with another?

How do you compare one person with another?

How do you compare one need with another?

How do you compare one occupation with another?

How do you compare one talent with another?

How do you compare one weather event with another?

How do you compare one costume with another?

Whilst the accurate comparison of relative appropriateness is necessary, along with the advancement of enlightened awareness, of course, of even more importance is the ability to make appropriate decisions.

One of the best ways to assess decision-making abilities is in the way people dress.

If they dress too carefully or fashionably, they obviously have nothing else happening in their minds.

If they dress too provocatively or outlandishly, they obviously have more interest in attracting attention to themselves rather than to the problems requiring redress.

If they dress too ordinarily or uniformly, they obviously have much more interest in following crowds than in being real leaders.

If they dress too lazily, they obviously would much prefer being in the privacy of home than in public, even if they do not have a home.

How people prefer to dress in private is a matter for no-one but themselves.

Public dressing, and public dressings-down, are otherwise.  They have political and psychological significance.

What is your acquaintance with the career of Angelica Kauffman? 

What is your acquaintance with satires?

Perhaps someone has portrayed you satirically, for one reason or another.

Perhaps you have given them cause to do so as a consequence of your wrongdoing.

Perhaps, though, you have merely aroused jealousy. 

If you have achieved success when other people yearn to achieve similar success, they may bitterly exist without gaining fame or notability or money or admiration and may regard you as an enemy.

Similarly, if you have achieved success when other people have long attempted to prevent such success from being achieved by anyone, they will definitely regard you as an enemy.

The acquisition of enemies is often outside one's control.  Even if one gives up on doing whatever one prefers to do, one's enemies may hold a long-term grudge of the most unreasonable and unseemly sort, however one chooses to dress.

One may dress classically or otherwise traditionally and still be treated abysmally.

All over the world, the prevailing reality of climate change is making the wearing of traditional costume unsuitable, particularly if those costumes are heirlooms covered in mud or burnt to a crisp.

Weather-related problems have always been political problems.

Prejudice-related problems have always been political problems.

How people have dressed has always influenced how they have been perceived.

What is your understanding of the history of costumes, uniforms, dress codes, religious clothing, fashions, work wear, casual wear, resort wear, active wear, emancipation wear and sumptuary laws? 

What is your acquaintance with the right to clothing, particularly the right sort of clothing for the likely weather conditions?

Which attire do you prefer to wear, and why?

How do you assess clothing and the wearers of it?

When, if ever, do you wear formal attire?

When, if ever, do you clothe yourself in business wear? 

How often do you place headwear upon your person?

How often do you place footwear where it is required?

How often do you wear gloves, or a scarf, or a shawl, or a belt, or jewellery?

The politics of clothing, like the politics of weather, has often been associated with sex and gender.

If you regard yourself as relatively female and/or feminine, do you usually wear a dress or trousers and a jacket or leggings and a top or something else entirely?

Do you know much about the politics of female trouser-wearing?

Do you know much about the politics of female corset-wearing? 

Do you know much about the politics of influential marriages?

Princess Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt married her relatively enlightened but persistently unfaithful cousin, Leopold III, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau.  One of her predecessors as duchess was her great grandmother, the independent-minded Countess Henriette Catherine of Nassau.

Henriette and her siblings grew up, in the mid 1600s, in affluent Holland rather than war-devastated Germany. 

What have been your personal experiences of devastation of one sort or another, and what did you wear on such occasions?

What is your acquaintance with cultural landscapes?

Perhaps you associate formal clothing with formal gardens.

Perhaps you associate ragged clothing with eroded landscapes.

What is your acquaintance with soil erosion?

What is your acquaintance with World Heritage Sites and World Heritage in Danger?

What is your acquaintance with the World Network of Biosphere Reserves?

What have you discovered about the world when examining a mappa mundi or two? 

What have you discovered about politics when examining controversial decisions?

How do you usually assess the value of conservation and conservation areas?

How do you attempt to prevent trickery from happening?

Perhaps you often dress up in disguises to address problems.

You may have noticed that Madame Adélaïde does so.  She is especially known to dress up, or down, as Diana.

Are you fond of fancy dress, even when alone? 

Perhaps you are eager to attend Covid-appropriate masquerade balls.

Where, though, should such events be held?

Perhaps you would prefer family gatherings. 

Henriette enjoyed many such occasions as a child.

Has your father ever worn a suit of armour?

Louise enjoyed retreating to the Luisium in the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm.

You may enjoy retreating to the loo.

Where are you usually able to spend time alone, if anywhere?

Perhaps you prefer to spend time in nature, even when responding to a call of nature, with or without dressing like Diana and thinking freely whilst doing so.

What is your acquaintance with the Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve and the Dresden Elbe Valley?

Perhaps you enjoy hunting in an unthinking sort of way.

Perhaps you enjoy building things in an unthinking sort of way.

Perhaps you enjoy wearing things in an unthinking sort of way.

Perhaps you enjoy eating things in an unthinking sort of way.

But what does it mean to be a thinking person or an unthinking person in the age of disastrous climate change?

What, if anything, have you been learning from Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Erdmannsdorff?

What does it mean to be a free lord or free lady in the 21st century? 

Perhaps you are mostly interested in the history of wigs and/or waistcoats and/or cravats and/or lace.

Perhaps you are mostly interested in the fact that the German word for nobility is Adel. 

Perhaps you are mostly interested in enjoying a virtual tour of the Luisium.

Perhaps you are mostly interested in the history, design and maintenance of beautiful gardens.

Perhaps you are mostly interested in the history of landscape art rather than landscape gardens.

Perhaps you are mostly interested in knowing why particular status groups continue to have control over the resources with which they can either preserve or transform landscapes, ecosystems, watercourses and especially waterways,

Even dressing in a style of one's own choosing may have detrimental consequences for other people and/or other species.

How do you distinguish between a cultural landscape and a natural landscape?

How do you distinguish between natural behaviours and non-natural behaviours?

How do you ascertain whether a change in a landscape or waterway is caused by natural events or non-natural events?

How do you compare changes over time?

What do you know about land management and water resource management?

What are you currently wearing, and why?

Who knows what you are currently wearing, and why?

How do you imagine you will be attired in a year from now, if you are still alive then?

Perhaps you are currently wearing the folk costume of an ethnic group, with or without being a descendant of any members of that group.

How do you assess cultural preferences and cultural biases?

Perhaps you are currently wearing a dressing gown or a bathrobe and a pair of slippers.  You may have a turban or towel on your head.

Perhaps you are wearing your nightclothes, if you wear any at all.

Perhaps you are currently naked, like a statue of Diana or Venus or Apollo.

Perhaps you are currently wearing undergarments and/or hosiery of your own design.

What has Leonhard Euler taught you about such specifics?

What has that gentleman taught you about communicating weather-related problems, and otherwise addressing those problems?

What has Isaac Newton taught you about communicating and addressing of weather-related problems?

What have various scientifically accomplished persons taught you about the history of Western fashion, and about invented traditions?

What is your acquaintance with anachronisms and anatopisms?

What do you know about anachronistic and anatopistic public policies? 

Perhaps you are currently wearing lingerie and evening gloves, high-heeled shoes, a long wig and an heirloom tiara, even if you regard yourself as male.

Perhaps you regard the past as a costume drama.

Perhaps you regard the present as a disaster film, particularly if you are attempting to recover from a real disaster, or a series of disasters.

Perhaps you regard the past and present mainly as a collection of costumes or as a collection of paintings or as a botanical collection or as a collection of fading memories.

How do you artistically represent the personification of air?

How do you politically represent the scientific aspects of humanly-modified atmospheric, geographic and societal conditions, and what do you wear whilst doing so?

Perhaps all reputable scientists and science writers should wear banyans in the digital public sphere.

How does Denis Diderot help you to improve the way ordinary people think and/or dress?

How does anyone help you to improve the way politicians think and/or dress?

The entire world continues to be an open-air museum, even with the air itself dangerously heating up, along with the oceans, the poles, the glaciers, the permafrost, and all the natural and unnatural hard surfaces, in every dimension. 

Some of the exhibits in the museum have been irreparably damaged or even destroyed.

Some of the exhibits have been mislabelled and/or misinterpreted.

Some of the exhibits can only be viewed in good weather.

Many of the exhibits are fragile.

Although the world also remains a living museum to some extent, it may not remain that way for long.

In much the same way as attempts at living history tend to be anachronistic and otherwise misguided, attempts to prepare for a living future may also be based on dubious ideas.

How have you attempted to resolve the problem, and with which outfit?