We’re concerned about getting sunburned and tanned

Lighter skin=beautiful skin in China. Not a racist thing (at least in its origins) but classist: the poors had to go work in the sun all day.

I gather it used to be the same in Europe and the west, but then the poors ended up cooped up in their office jobs while the beautiful people could go on beach vacations, and suddenly tans were in.

Wasn’t this type of dress featured in a few dystopian movies in the 80s and 90s? I remember watching a few films as a kid where they portrayed the distant future and the world had grown too hot and dangerous for anyone to go outside in bare skin so they had to cover up in rags or cloth and rich people wore futuristic skin tight suits with breathing masks and eye covering.

The news story is making light of it all … but in a few films back then, it was a sign that we had destroyed our world and we were no longer fit to live in it, so that we now had to protect ourselves from the environment in more extreme ways.