What Clothes Can Keep Our Body Cool During Summer?
April 25, 2017
Last Updated: 2026-04-02
It started with a pair of linen pants.
I ordered them in April, they arrived, I loved them, I washed them on cold and hung them to dry exactly like you're supposed to — and they came back two inches shorter. Not "hmm, did these shrink a little" shorter. "These are now capris and my whole proportions are ruined" shorter.
I stood in my bathroom holding them for a long time. Then I folded them and put them back in the drawer. They're still there. I don't know why I haven't donated them. Maybe because I spent sixty dollars on them and my brain hasn't processed the grief yet.
Anyway. That's what made me actually start paying attention to fabric.
Not because I want to be a fashion person. I really don't. I just want to walk to the subway in August without feeling like I'm being slowly cooked inside my own clothes. I want to sit through a client meeting without thinking about whether my shirt is doing something embarrassing. I want to feel like I'm wearing almost nothing. That's the goal. That's the whole goal.
Why do we feel cool
You know that feeling when you've just finished a run and a breeze hits you? That's not just "nice"—it's your body basically performing a high-stakes engineering miracle. Since we’re warm-blooded, we’re basically walking heaters that can't turn ourselves off. If we don’t dump that heat fast, we’re toasted.
The main trick we have is sweating. It’s gross, sure, but when that liquid evaporates, it drags the heat away with it. I remember being in Kyoto last July, standing in front of a vending machine for ten minutes just because the exhaust fan felt like a godsend against my soaked linen shirt. I still regret not buying that weirdly expensive matcha ice cream there. I was too busy trying to calculate if my sweat was evaporating fast enough to keep me from fainting.
To actually feel that "cool," your clothes have to get out of the way. If you’re wearing something that traps the moisture, you’re basically just sous-viding yourself. You need airflow. You need the sweat to actually leave.
Which clothes we wear to keep our body cool
The Principle of Keeping Cool with Clothes
1. Looseness
First off, Unlike the tight-fitting clothes, loose clothing doesn't attach to our body. I have this one oversized linen shirt—it’s a hideous shade of beige that makes me look like a desert nomad—but the way the air just circulates inside it? Pure magic. Tight clothes are the enemy. They stick to your skin like a bad memory, trapping that heat right where you don't want it.
Also Read: How To Wear Loose Clothes
Highly moisture-absorbent fabrics can absorb sweat from the skin surface and diffuse sweat to the fabric surface through the capillary action of fabric fibers, thereby accelerating evaporation.
Also Read: How to Style a Linen Blouse For Women
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2. Lightness
The heavy/thick clothes are hard to blow, which means air flows are hindered and sweats are also difficult to evaporate. |
3. Breathability
For example, when explaining "breathability": You can add that "Breathable fabrics usually have a loose structure, such as mesh fabric, or use special weaving methods, such as jacquard weave, to increase air circulation.
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Here are some guidelines to determine if a fabric is breathable and comfor
4. Moisture Absorption
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Also Read: How to Style a Linen Blouse For Women
5. Light-Colored
And don’t even get me started on colors. I love my "all black everything" aesthetic, but the sun doesn't care about my vibes. Black absorbs everything. Light colors—whites, light blues, that pale pink I’m always hesitant to wear—actually reflect the heat. It’s the difference between standing in the shade and standing inside a toaster.
6. Clothing Styles
In addition to fabrics and colors, clothing styles also affect how cool we feel. For example, loose dresses or long skirts have better air circulation and are more cool and comfortable compared to tight pants. Sleeveless or short-sleeved tops allow our arms to be fully exposed to the air, helping to dissipate heat. In addition, V-neck or round-neck clothes are also more breathable than high-necked clothes.
7. Consider the Wearing Occasion
I still haven't figured out how to look "professional" in a 95°F heatwave without losing my mind. A silk shirt helps, but then you spend the whole meeting wondering if you're getting sweat stains or if the AC is actually working. (It’s usually not).
Clothing fabric selection
Natural Fibers
A. Linen (non-pure linen)
Linen clothing is breathable, cool and also highly moisture absorbent. However, its texture is hard, stiff, and easy to wrinkle. (except for the high-quality soft linen)Okay so linen is the obvious answer and it's the obvious answer for a reason.
It breathes. It dries fast when you sweat. It gets better looking the more you wear it, which almost nothing else does. And a linen dress, just a plain, slightly oversized linen dress, is genuinely one of the most effortless things you can put on your body. Office? Fine. Drinks after? Fine. Farmers market at 8am looking like you have your life together when you absolutely do not? Perfect.
The wrinkling thing doesn't bother me anymore. I made my peace with it. Linen wrinkles because that's what linen does, not because you failed at something. Once I stopped fighting it I started actually liking it.
Also Read: How To Match Your Linen Clothing
One more thing: a linen blazer kept at your office is one of those quietly brilliant decisions. Air conditioning in American office buildings is genuinely unhinged, and having something to throw on that doesn't make you feel like you've changed your whole outfit is worth it.
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B. Cotton Gauze
I feel like cotton gauze doesn't get talked about enough and I want to fix that.
It's lighter than linen. Softer. When you put it on it sort of floats. There's no other word for it. The wrinkles look intentional because they're soft wrinkles, not stiff ones, so you end up looking like you meant to dress this way, like you're someone who summers somewhere nice and doesn't think too hard about it.
It's too relaxed for certain situations, I'll be honest. But if your life has any significant amount of just existing in the world in it, walking around, working from a coffee shop, not having to impress anyone in particular, cotton gauze will make you happy. I can't really defend it beyond that. I just love it.
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C. Silk, but let's actually talk about this
Here's where it gets complicated, because silk is not one thing.
When most people think silk they think satin-weave silk. Smooth, shiny, drapy, feels cool for about twenty minutes and then becomes a very expensive way to feel trapped. Silk as a fiber is actually quite good at trapping heat, which is why it gets used in winter underlayers in a lot of cold-weather cultures. The "silk feels cooling" thing is mostly a texture illusion.
But silk chiffon is something else entirely. Silk georgette. Silk gauze. These are so light they barely exist. Wind moves through them. If you're going to do silk in summer, this is what you're looking for, not the satin, not the charmeuse, not the twill.
The problem is that real silk is expensive and a little annoying to care for. I have one silk chiffon dress that I love more than is probably healthy, and every time it needs washing I have to be in a certain psychological state to deal with it. Cold water, gentle cycle, mesh bag, lay flat to dry. It's not complicated but it requires me to care in a way I don't always have bandwidth for on a Tuesday night.
D. Natural Fiber Blended Fabrics
In order to take into account the advantages of natural fibers and make up for their shortcomings, we can choose natural fiber blended fabrics. For example, cotton-linen blended fabrics combine the softness and comfort of cotton with the breathability and coolness of linen, while also reducing the stiffness and wrinkle-prone shortcomings of linen. Silk blended with cotton or linen fabrics can reduce the high price of silk and make it more everyday.
Chemical Fiber
A. Chiffon
Chiffon can be divided into silk chiffon (100% mulberry silk ) and artificial silk (100% terylene). All basic features are as follows:- Texture is light and transparent. Feel soft, non-elastic, breathable and draped.
- Elegant, comfortable, wear-proof, uneasy to fuzzing and pilling, size is stable and anti-wrinkle.
B. Lace
The types of lace are numerous. However, whatever it's filament, monofilament, warp knitting or embroidered clothing, its texture is relatively light and pellucid.
C. Modal
Modal has a good softness and excellent moisture absorption. Its luster, softness, hygroscopicity, dyeing property, dye fastness is better than pure cotton (super-75% cotton contained ) products.
Questions people actually ask me
Can you wear linen wrinkled in a professional setting?
Yes, with conditions. If it's wrinkled evenly all over, that's just linen being linen and most people read it as intentional. If there's one weird crumple on the front from where you sat for three hours, smooth it with your hands or hang it in a steamy bathroom. Linen releases faster than you'd think. Ironing it is optional and honestly a little beside the point.
Is silk actually machine washable?
I don't know with certainty, but what I do is cold water, delicate cycle, mesh bag, don't wring it, lay it flat. Most of my silk has survived this. But I wouldn't do it with anything irreplaceable, and I'd read the tag first. Sometimes the tag is telling the truth.
Should I wear sleeves or go sleeveless in the heat?
It depends on whether you're going to be in the sun or not. Walking around outside, sleeves in a genuinely light fabric might actually help. Sitting in an aggressively air-conditioned office all day, sleeveless, obviously, just keep something to throw on for the commute. There's no universal answer here. Your summer and my summer are not the same summer.
My actual warm-weather wardrobe right now is embarrassingly small. A few linen dresses. One cotton gauze situation. A pair of wide-leg pants that I can wear anywhere. That's mostly it.
It's less than I used to own. It's also so much easier.
The linen pants that shrunk are still in my drawer. I keep meaning to do something about them.
Post By: Doris
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