What’s happening? What’s going on? I usually don’t know what day it is, but this heat wave really has fried my brain — I can’t keep my weekly happenings straight, much less put together a cohesive outfit. 

For years, I’ve been trying to get my philosophy of dressing — fashion over function — to take off. I’ve faithfully adhered to this doctrine, even in my rough transition from East Coast autumns to Southern California “falls.” But I might have to concede here: I can keep up conservative dress in the high 70s, even the mid-80s. But this triple-digit development? I’m cooked. Literally and figuratively. 

The numbers justify my brain fog, mostly. Downtown Los Angeles hit 104 degrees Monday, its fourth consecutive triple-digit day — the longest October streak on record downtown and a tie for the longest stretch at any time of year. The turmoil isn’t over, either: A major heat wave is forecast to persist through at least Thursday. 

To address the question of why I dress for fashion over function, I have gone looking for a dead theorist to answer it for me, as any comparative literature student must. 

Thorstein Veblen understood me

My philosophy has a patron saint, and he is 19th-century economist Thorstein Veblen. In his 1899 work “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Veblen devoted a chapter to dress, arguing that it “must not only be conspicuously expensive and inconvenient, it must at the same time be up to date.” Elegant clothing works because it proves the wearer “consumes without producing.”

Throughout history, discomfort was never a side effect of status; it was the evidence. The high heel, the corset and the “general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women’s apparel” proved, to him, that the women wearing them were still “the economic dependent of the man.” A layered black outfit in 100-degree weather may be the most aristocratic act available to me: No one manually laboring outdoors would dress like this. 

But for Veblen, getting dressed is a message to other people — one of money and status. That is not my aim; I am not overdressed to demonstrate that I don’t work — sources have affirmed that I am a “workaholic,” oops — but because the outfit is killer. The discomfort is what the look costs me.

Decadent writer Charles Baudelaire got closer to the crux of it in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” where he insisted that “dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance,” and that for the dandy, such things are “no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.” He described a longing for “a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.”

Alas, heat waves are indifferent to that distinction. Somewhere between my apartment and USC Village, personal originality degenerates into personal perspiration, and the only thing my outfit communicates is poor judgment. 

What men can do besides jorts and flip-flops 

In 1930, psychologist J.C. Flügel coined the “Great Masculine Renunciation” — the shift, beginning in the mid-18th century, when European men gave up color, ornament and heels for dark, plain tailoring. He wrote that “Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful” in exchange for “being only useful.” Men and the bare minimum — what’s new?

In this case, Southern California’s heat wave asks the rest of us to make the same trade, and this week I have capitulated: Function wins. But surrendering to the weather is not the same as surrendering to the uniform. The T-shirt-jorts-flip-flops uniform is Flügel’s renunciation in its final form: useful, but nothing more. When I people-watch at Maru Coffee in the Arts District, the best-dressed men are invariably the ones who suffered slightly for it.

The sacrifice for function’s sake is not extreme. A straight-hemmed shirt worn untucked holds cloth off the torso, and a camp-collar left open does the same at the throat. Pleated linen trousers are an airier alternative to jorts. Seersucker is woven so some threads pucker, keeping most of the fabric off the skin. None of this requires discomfort; it requires only the semblance of a man choosing something more stylish for himself. 

How to assemble the look

Start with natural fibers. Cotton, linen, muslin, silk — anything that is actually porous. Treat polyester and other synthetics as what they are: plastic.

Keep the black, but lose the fitted silhouette. A gauzy midi, a flowing skirt or a wide-legged trouser vents where a fitted knit cannot. My unspeakably priced laser-cut leather mesh tunic finally justifies itself: Every hexagon brings ventilation. 

Layering is the casualty of heat, so replace it with texture. Lace over a cotton slip, an open-weave knit, a sheer overlayer. 

Let the shoes carry the season by themselves. An ankle boot can still evoke autumn; if your calves can swing a knee-high boot in this heat, go for it. Wear natural-fiber socks to keep your feet dry and hopefully unripe, and if the day demands an open toe, Havaianas or a leather sandal works — just this once, I will allow a men’s flip-flop moment. 

If the fabric science fails, the nuclear option remains: despawn to a cooler location. My Expedia account is shaking in anticipation, and fall break begins in one day. 

Julia Ho is a senior writing about fashion history, pop culture and the shopping decisions in between in her column, “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” which runs every other Wednesday. She is also a chief copy editor and the staff development director at the Daily Trojan.