My name is not relevant to this column. I will say that I am 67 years old. I am retired. I was, for 31 years, a civil engineer with the Georgia Department of Transportation, where I worked primarily on bridge load analysis and drainage systems, and where I developed, over three decades of professional practice, a habit of thinking carefully about materials and their properties before drawing conclusions. I live on Edelweiss Strasse, in a house I have owned since 2007. I wear traditional Trachten lederhosen every day of the year.

I want to address the comments.

Not the comments in the abstract. I mean the specific, repeated, face-to-face comments that I receive on Bruckenstrasse and in the shops and at the Bodensee and at the Festhalle on Thursday evenings, which have, over the 19 years I have lived here, accumulated into a body of commentary that I have grown, finally, tired of receiving without response. I have read in this paper the work of Gunter the pretzel vendor, who has been similarly positioned, and I found his approach instructive. I am going to say what I have to say, once, in this column, and then I am going to return to wearing my lederhosen in peace.

The comment takes several forms. The most common form is a variation on "aren't you hot?" delivered with an expression that suggests the speaker believes they are the first person to have thought of this. The second most common form is "that's so authentic!" delivered with an enthusiasm that implies I am wearing the lederhosen as a performance for the speaker's benefit. The third most common form is a question addressed not to me but to whoever is standing near the speaker — a spouse, a child, a friend — in which the speaker indicates me with a gesture and says something like "look at that guy" or "can you believe that," as though I am a piece of the town's décor and not a resident who can hear perfectly well.

I want to address these in order.

On the question of whether I am hot: yes, in summer, I am warmer than I would be in a cotton t-shirt and cargo shorts, which is the alternative the speaker is presumably imagining. I want to be precise about the thermal dynamics, because I am an engineer and precision is how I think about problems.

Traditional Bavarian Trachten lederhosen are constructed from tanned deerskin or goatskin, with a typical hide thickness of 2 to 3 millimeters. The hide is, by the standards of woven textiles, a poor conductor of heat — leather has a thermal conductivity of approximately 0.14 to 0.25 watts per meter-kelvin, compared to cotton at 0.04 to 0.06 W/m·K, which is actually lower, but the relevant comparison is not conductivity alone, it is the full thermal exchange package. The leather's low breathability is offset, in a properly constructed Trachten garment, by three factors: the cut of the garment, which is designed for the thigh and seat specifically and leaves the lower leg entirely uncovered; the fit, which is traditionally somewhat loose through the seat and thigh to allow air circulation across the hide surface; and the specific heat capacity of the leather itself, which, because it is a dense material, absorbs and releases heat slowly, functioning as a thermal buffer rather than a direct transmitter.

My lederhosen, in July in Helen, Georgia, are warmer than shorts. I am not claiming otherwise. What I am claiming is that the thermal differential, in practice, is smaller than the speaker imagines, and that the speaker's assumption — that wearing leather in 95-degree heat is an obvious and severe error — reflects an unfamiliarity with the material science of the garment rather than an insight about my comfort that I have somehow missed.

I have been wearing these lederhosen, or their predecessors, for 19 years. I have not suffered a heat-related medical event. I have not, in the summer months, been meaningfully impeded in any activity I wished to conduct. I am, I will admit, hotter than I would prefer to be on the walk from my house to the Bruckenstrasse in August. I am not going to give you the satisfaction of saying by how much.

On the question of authenticity: I am not wearing the lederhosen for you.

I want to say this clearly, because I think the "so authentic!" comment, delivered with warmth and apparent approval, is actually the most irritating of the three. It treats my clothing choice as a contribution to your tourism experience. It treats me as a feature of the Helen attraction — a local color element, a piece of the Bavarian-village set dressing — rather than as a person who made a decision about how to dress and is, like every adult who has made a decision about how to dress, entitled to have that decision understood as personal rather than performative.

I began wearing Trachten in 1998, when I was stationed in Germany for a GDOT infrastructure exchange program and spent three weeks working with the Bavarian State Highway Authority on a bridge-deck drainage project. The Bavarian engineers wore Trachten. The wearing was not theatrical. It was practical and traditional and suited to the people wearing it. I found it appealing in the way that any well-designed garment is appealing: it was made for specific purposes, it fit the body correctly, it had been developed over centuries of use, and it showed. I bought a pair before I came home.

I moved to Helen in 2007 partly because it was the only place in Georgia where wearing Trachten did not require, at every social encounter, an explanation. I was wrong about this, as it turns out. The explanation is required constantly, even here, perhaps especially here, because in Helen the lederhosen reads as performance and the performance is, apparently, expected to be for the visitors rather than for the wearer.

I am not performing. I am dressed.

On the third category of comment — the "look at that guy" observation delivered to a companion within my earshot — I want to say only this: I can hear you. I have excellent hearing. I am 67, not 87. Whatever you are saying to your companion about the man on the corner of Bruckenstrasse in the leather shorts, I am aware that you are saying it, and I am making a private assessment of the person saying it that I will keep to myself because I am, despite the impressions this column may be creating, a civil person.

I moved here because this town is built, structurally and legally, around a specific aesthetic commitment. The Bavarian architectural ordinance applies to every commercial building on the core streets. The town spent 57 years developing a coherent visual identity that references, imperfectly and specifically and with considerable local character, a Central European Alpine tradition. I live inside that tradition. I live inside it not as a tourist and not as a performer but as a resident who finds the tradition meaningful and who has organized his retirement around a place that, whatever its complications, takes the aesthetic seriously.

What I want is to walk from my house to the Bodensee in August in my lederhosen without someone asking me if I am hot, as though the question contains an insight I have not encountered in 19 years of daily practice.

I am, in August, somewhat warmer than I would prefer. The thermal conductivity data is what it is. I have reviewed it. I have made my decision.

The lederhosen are not coming off.

— A Helen Resident, Edelweiss Strasse