Weather, Local Knowledge and Everyday Life 172 The end of weather: outdoor garment industry and the quest for absolute comfort Vladimir Jankovic (University of Manchester, UK) In the well-known paper on climate stabilization appearing in Science in 1974, Kellog and Schneider addressed the intentional and accidental climate changes. There they said that the ability of human actors to alter climate depends on their chosen scale of action: for example, “wearing warm clothes on a cold day is probably the smallest scale, heating and cooling the air in a house is a slightly larger conventional undertaking, and changing the air temperature over a large city is now quite commonplace, although not planned” (Kellog & Schneider, 1974, p. 1166). Today I’d like to revisit these scales of engagement and, in particular, focus on the relationship between the perception of daily weather, environmental comfort, and the recent boom in outdoor clothing industry. This I do partly because clothing practices are still the most common and familiar form of climate control and partly because their invisibility in the science studies betrays a continuing appetite for the megalomaniacal approaches thrust upon us by the fascination with climate and weather as ‘global’ phenomena. If weather and climate are global, so is clothing. We dress for many reasons and here I will not be able to look into those related to aesthetics, economics, power, gender, or class. Instead I will discuss the uses of weather and climate in lifestyle campaigns that promote ‘healthy’, ‘comfortable’, and ‘high-performance’ clothing. I will briefly mention the uses of new fabrics as part of the new outdoor culture and the ways in which industry uses the material science and imagery for advertising purposes. But I will also suggest that many such campaigns use the physiology of sports and textile biophysics as the scientific basis and commercial valuation of outdoor safety and bodily comfort in virtually any weather conditions. Such arguments make sense to and gear-intensive leisure communitas, technophilic affluent classes, and, more generally, in a market-driven culture of personal comfort and risk-aversion. The physiological analyses of clothing hark back to the Enlightenment campaigns for promotion of wool as underwear fabric, underwritten by Count Rumford’s experiments on hygroscopic and insulating properties of materials (Thompson, 1787; Little, 2001). Nineteenth-century doctors promoted wool as the fabric of choice for adverse condition and, by the 1860s, rational clothing took sway over Europe and North America (Renbourn, 1957; Renbourn & Rees, 1972). Inspired by Amelia Bloomer, a Victorian guru of comfortable dress and the inventor of female trousers, the Rational Dress Society was founded in 1881 and in 1884, Gustav Jaeger, professor of Physiology at Stuttgart developed his Sanitary Woolen (Cunningham, 2002; Summers, 2001). But nineteenth- century industry also used man-made materials, as for example in the first commercially available rainwear, Mackintosh, the jacket made of rubber coated fabrics which kept