Summer dirndls and lederhosen: hot stuff!

June, July, August… Long, hot days; warm evenings; even in the middle of the night on the mountainsides of Bavaria, the temperature rarely drops. This is just the kind of weather in which many of Bavaria’s legendary fairs are held, or when Bavarian weddings take place in traditional dress – and just the kind of weather in which an old-fashioned dirndl with its long skirt and tight bodice can be quite uncomfortable for the girls sat in the beer gardens.

There are, however, plenty of ways to look the part and keep cool in summer dirndls and lederhosen if you’re visiting Bavaria this summer: here are our three rules for how to adapt Alpine fashion to decidedly un-Alpine temperatures.

Mercury rising? Skirts too!

It might sound simple, but there is often so much talk about how long a dirndl dress needs to be to qualify as “traditional” that it’s often forgotten that the length of a skirt is, above all, a question of function: when the temperatures are low, so are the skirt hems; if the mercury rises, the hem starts creeping up the leg so that more skin can be exposed to fresh air. There’s only one hard-and-fast rule about dirndl skirt length: anything under 50cm is too short. Up to this minimum, be our guests…

 

Keep cool in leather (yes, really)

If 50cm is still too long for you when it’s sweltering hot, the good news is that lederhosen for ladies can be considerably shorter: after all, they fit snug and are impervious to prying eyes – quite in contrast to light, airy skirts – so there’s no reason for a minimum length. So donning leather hotpants can actually keep you cool.

That might sound somewhat counter-intuitive: after all, lederhosen leather is thick, so doesn’t it stand to reason that it will heat you up? Actually, although not airy, natural leather lets a lot of air through and allows the skin underneath it to breathe, so it’s by no means uncomfortable to wear. Another advantage is that, as cool as they keep you, ladies’ lederhosen look hot, as Stockerpoint’s ladies’ range proves.

 

Loosen up a little

What a lot of us don’t like about traditional dirndls in summer is how tightly they fit the upper body. But although the lace-up bodice and the hour-glass figure it helps to achieve is part of traditional Bavarian clothing, there are plenty of ways around this uncomfortable element.

One thing to do is to compensate for a tight midriff section by allowing your shoulders more freedom: by going for dirndls with a higher neckline but thinner straps, you can even cut out the need for a blouse without looking cheap. Dirndl models with a 50s twist such as Paloma show you how this can be achieved, the trendy denim turning this cheat into a style statement.

Of course, if you’ve decided to go for lederhosen, then you’ve got even more options open. Instead of clamping corsets around your tummy, you can go for short-sleeved checked shirts or almost-sheer cotton tops. Given that the thick leather and horizontal cut of the leather breeches will accentuate your hips, there’s no need to tighten at the waist to show off your ladylike curves…

So that’s how too keep cool in summer – only the poor boys might find themselves getting hot under the collar!