Loose cotton dress for tropics

[GlitteringUnicorn]

Hi
I am about to spend a few weeks in the tropics- it will be very hot with high humidity.
I am trying to find cool, loose, floaty and lightweight dresses. Ideally will pack easily, dry easily and not plain (as they show every mark). Definitely not thick cotton/jersey and must cover my arms.
This is the best I have found

www.aspiga.com/products/emma-cotton-dress-shell-navy-white

But £90 seems quite excessive and I will need to buy 4-5 of this sort of thing.

Has anyone seen anything similar please? (And there won't be any opportunity to buy something out there before someone suggests that!)
Thank you

https://www.woolovers.com/womens/dresses/womens-pocket-pinafore-dress-shadow-floral-print-30894

I have this in a print pattern and love it

How I testing, @beybey20. Do you have any other sources for that view or is it just David Arnold and the authors of the paper you've quoted? If so, you can probably understand why no-one on this thread is aware of the recasting (by some) of that term as offensive.

Sorry, *interesting

Where are you going? If it’s mozzie/midgey/sandfly season and you’re not acclimatised to tropics I’d look at long sleeves cotton/linen shirt or wrap to protect from bites. Whenever family visit is from uk (far north qld) they get annihailated

@Mercurial123 , No, I dont get hot and uncomfortable in jeans, you get used to it living in dare I say the Tropics, you adjust to the heat, you see plenty of people with jeans on, its the tourists that tend not to wear them as they would be uncomfortable as they prefer shorts most of the time (something I never wear). I have lived in Thailand (among other countries) and same same.. (as you mentioned you were there a few months ago)

@Filamumof9 , same here takes me a while to warm up when I go back to the UK, I have just been out and bought DH some jeans in the sale...bargain, he too wears jeans most of the time, in the heat...

To the OP, have a look at Finery (John Lewis as well) I have a few smarter cotton dresses with elbow length sleeves, prices can be very good in the sale.
I like buttoned up dresses then they can also be used as a beach cover up.

@JackHamnerJilly fair enough our bodies adapt differently to heat/humidity. I live in a hot country, and the humidity is unbearable for 3 months of the year. I've been here over twenty years, and I'll never get used to it. Wearing jeans is my idea of hell in this weather unless I'm in ac and not going outside.

Also, people from Asia tend not to sweat much, which makes life much easier in these temperatures.

I swear by these Amazon dresses in the summer. Wash in cold water and hang to dry. They are loose and flowy but not cotton.

Try shirtdresses. Brands aimed at older shoppers might have them. There's a designer that Camilla P B wears but I can't remember the name off the top of my head. (country life, july 11 2022, I think)
I'm not being ageist, I mean classic well-made styles that tend to be favoured by people who expect to get decades of wear out of a dress, not something fast-fashion.
Toast might have something.

That's why I said something, thought the OP wouldn't be aware. Middle-aged white women buying linens to wear to the former colonies dont want to be talked at about colonial language.

There is a lot of academic literature on the topic available on the internet, as well as some more mainstream articles on it.

You could get a couple of these with a linen shirt to cover arms?

www.marksandspencer.com/pure-cotton-printed-midi-t-shirt-dress/p/clp60652870?intid=mobile_app_pdp_share

'Coloured people'? Tsk tsk. Do bore off. You have nothing to teach anyone.

I'm not going to ask you to explain futher @beybey20 and I will do some further reading, I've done a prelimenary search and I can't find much about it. I agree it is othering in the sense that the weather in regions that experence Tropical Weather is other, if you are writing from a European perspective, as are the authors of the paper you quote. It's tropical, and the question the OP is asking is directly relating to an item of clothing that is suitable for a tropical climate. One doesn't live in either The West, or The Tropics.

If you were looking to buy some warm furry boots for a trip to somewhere where the climate was Arctic without specifying one of the seven countries included so you could remain fairly anonymous, and you wanted to ask Mumsnet for reccomendations, would that be a problem? I'll keep investigating that one too.

Still here? 🥱

Middle-aged white women buying linens to wear to the former colonies dont want to be talked at about colonial language.

Oh pur-lease. Just out of interest, what are middle-aged white women allowed to do? Can we visit a former colony or not. Or only if we don't buy linen? Or only if we don't use the word "tropics"? Is it evil westernised europe-centered white supremacy to say that tropical regions are hot? If we don't visit the former colonies at all, for fear of being embarrassingly colonialist, I guess we'd be shunning non-white people, right, and failing to contribute to their economies, or something?

Maybe OP is off to Ethiopia or Thailand, which are not former colonies. Is she allowed to ask about cool clothing for the tropics in that case?

I am happy to learn about colonialism, and agree it's an important part of history. But you cannot decolonialize. You can't undo the fact that European countries took over other countries, or that Genghis Khan, the Han dynasty, the Aztecs and many others colonised other kingdoms. Telling off other people for saying "tropics" doesn't make you a better person who has magically freed themselves from any associative guilt for colonialist crimes. The history of humanity is the history of constant colonisation. That doesn't make it all OK – we need to understand it, study it and redress unfairness and disadvantage. But we can't undo it.

Apologies for rant OP!

Tribes? TRIBES?

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/spring-2001/the-trouble-with-tribe

[[https://www.globalmandalaclothing.com/ do lots of cheap cotton and 100% viscose dresses and tops that are great in hot temps.

@MrsWhattery I dont know what your point is. Did you even read the article you linked?

I am not trying to make myself feel better. I didn't do anything?

I'm passing on information that some people might not have known about. You can go on using whatever othering language you want, it's not illegal.

P.S. Google Decolonise, I dont think you understand what that means (hint: it doesn't mean undoing history!)

Yes. My point is that you are using a word that, much more so than tropics, has been identified as problematic and colonialist by a number of academics and commentators. If you are going to start picking people apart for saying "the tropics", well "tribes" is just as contested. The author of that article thinks it's not necessary to avoid it, but it sums up some of the complaints that are long the same lines as your objections to tropics.

Lots and lots of very thin Indian cotton dresses on Etsy, in all the prints you can think of. This is lovely www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1733994889/

I know "decolonise the curriculum" and "decolonise language" etc don't mean reversing history per se, but i do think they are an attempt to whitewash the past and "make up for it" by fannying around with academic niceties, very often in order to yes literally make people feel holier than thou and absolved from being tarred with the brush of being a bad western white person.

If it isn't about that, why doesn't the same thing happen with non-white, non-western colonisation? - of which there is plenty including at least as recently as European colonisation. I'm not at all saying colonisation is/was fine or had no ill effects or that white Europeans didn't do terrible things. They did. I'm saying the huge trend to self-flagellate and finger-wag over it is suspiciously, itself, white, western and delineated by race and geography.

I do accept that I'm being a bit facile and baiting you so I apologise for that. It's all just so tiresome and dishonest and pisses me off.