(“I was asked by a local, ‘Are you a lineman?'”)

In dressage you are what you wear—at least sometimes. Along the way if you’re a sweet young thing riding in her first dressage show, you learn not to wear blue panties under your white breeches—especially if it’s going to rain. You also learn you can wear a black coat, and at a schooling show you can wear black breeches, but if you wear both at the same time, you look too much like Zorro.

The new protective headgear rules have spawned another look at show attire in general. We’ve all donated our top hats to the local theater group. Will our tailcoats be going next? They do look somewhat incongruous with a helmet.

What might replace them is open to question. The point of the old attire was not just its formality, but that it be inconspicuous so as to celebrate the horse and the performance, not be outfit.

All sorts of bizarre, cutesy-pie proposals have emerged. Bad designers gone wild! Their lines often call to mind the old shadbelly, (“Why?” you might ask.) but flavored with touches of Vegas kitsch, avant-garde Phil Knight football unis, and StarTreky spandex. God save us and dress us like real athletes!

Even everyday working riding clothes can confuse non-horse people. On frigid New England mornings I would wear riding breeches over my long johns, tall wool socks, and Bean boots (often with spurs) as I drove around to lessons. Stopping in to a coffee shop, I was asked by a local, “Are you a lineman?” My first thought was that he had misidentified what he thought were football pants. Then I realized he was thinking I used my spurs to climb telephone poles.

When I started teaching, a lot of the high-tech, outdoor wear which we take for granted, had not been invented. Polar fleece? Gore-Tex? Try just putting on a few extra shirts. In the days before every Southern California yuppie wannabe had an L.L. Bean catalog on their coffee table, a lot of folks living south of the 40th Parallel had never even seen a down vest. This was well before Back to the Future debuted with Marty McFly modeling one as he skateboarded around Hill Valley.

It was back then on one January night that our employer assigned Susan and me to drive a pair of geldings bound for Venezuela from Virginia to the quarantine station in Miami. (Their papers listed them as stallions because only breeding stock was eligible for import into that country. But that’s another story.) Shortly after sunrise the next morning the van crossed the state line into Florida, and we pulled into an I-95 rest area. The temperature was a brisk 50°, but obviously much milder than it had been when we left Virginia the night before. I was still wearing my down vest, and as I made my way to the canteen, a guy in the parking lot did a double take, turned, and exclaimed, “Hey, buddy, why are you wearing a life preserver?”