It did not even go below twenty, yet many people saw a need for puffer jackets! Surely, we’re made of sterner stuff? Or maybe not

By Mao Shan Wang

This week, we experienced an equatorial “winter”.

At first, it was the jokes. A friend of mine, in a group chat, was reading aloud the lively dialogue among his Penang-born Singaporean cousins: “Autumn in SG”; “Cold, cold, cold”; “It’s winter going into spring”; “We can wear our Japan winter clothing”; “Hahaha…”

Then there was the ST article the day before, “The Big Chill: Coping with the cold and the rain in Singapore”. The big chill! Coping! How difficult the chill! ST Life journalist Alyssa “Wedder” Woo, in a video report for the online edition of the paper, claimed that “tourists and Singaporeans are taking the opportunity to don their winter wear”, with one interviewee in a lightweight duster coat confirming Ms Woo’s observation: “I’m wearing my trench coat like winter in Europe or somewhere!”

It must be cold, the chill!

I did not feel it, but I sure saw it. This morning, in the slowest train in the world, the East-West line of the MRT, I saw so many commuters in sweatshirts that I was certain the price of French terry spiked. People didn’t look like they were dressed to go to work; they appeared to be going to the cinema. As the train became a sardine can, I moved inwards and sighted the first quilted jacket of the day! Three seats away, a napping chap was in a full-zip jacket, zipped all the way to the top, face further obscured by a similarly coloured face mask. Then a woman in a wool-knit varsity jacket appeared. By the doors, a guy in a faux leather biker jacket and another in a pile-lined zip-up hoodie. Was there any Uniqlo’s famed Heattech innerwear under all that?

During lunch, I was at Orchard Central and out of curiosity, I dropped by Uniqlo. There was an extraordinary large number of office ladies. At the queue to pay, nearly everyone was buying an outer, particularly a hoodie and the ultra-light down! Who would need down on a 23°C day? I wondered too soon. As I was leaving, into my view came a thirtysomething couple descending on the escalator wearing identical grey puffer jackets!

What impressed me this afternoon was a severe lack of T-shirts and shorts. There were virtually no denim cut-offs! Bare legs were as enclosed as bare arms. I do not remember when I last saw so many stocking-ed limbs—opaque black, no less. The décolletage had gone into hiding too. Neckwear was having a moment, especially neck warmers. Modest fashion should have made the headlines.

In the early evening, I took a bus to Raffles City. As I moved to the rear, I saw a guy in a thick, pull-over hoodie. That wasn’t surprising, but the ear muffs were! I looked out of the bus window to be certain it wasn’t snowing. I looked at him again. He looked very comfortable, very “big chill”.

After dinner, I was walking to the slowest train in the world, when something literally stopped me in my tracks: a pink fur jacket that could have been from Tom Ford’s Gucci of fall 2001! The woman—a bud of no more than twenty three—was cigarette-dragging-happy, the puffs of smoke acting as visible breath, the condensation of winter freeze. How appropriate!

According to ST, the coldest day in Singapore was in January 1934: it was 19.4 degrees that day. What did people at that time wear? According to my mother, no one heard of down. Uniqlo wasn’t even born.

Photos: Zhen Jiepai