Travel doesn’t begin at the airport.
It begins the moment you decide where you’re going. That first hit of excitement when a destination moves from vague idea to actual plan. The slightly obsessive flight-searching phase, refreshing the same route across four different booking sites at varying times of day because you read somewhere that Tuesday at 3am is statistically cheaper. The hotel research spiral. The Google Maps deep-dive into neighbourhoods you’ve never heard of, mentally walking streets you haven’t visited yet.
And then — the part nobody talks about enough — the shopping.
Because before a single bag is packed, there is the deeply important and entirely justifiable business of figuring out what you’re going to wear.
The Tourist Problem
Let me be clear about something. When I travel, I am not looking to stand out. I am not arriving anywhere as a walking advertisement for the fact that I am visiting. No bucket hat with a camera around my neck. No matching luggage set rolled through cobblestone streets at maximum volume. No loudly asking where the nearest Starbucks is whilst standing outside an independent café that has been serving better coffee since before I was born.
Nobody likes the brash, in-your-face tourist. You know the one. The person who treats an entire country like a theme park designed specifically for their enjoyment, moving through it without any particular interest in the people who actually live there.
I refuse to be that person.
Respecting a place means respecting its people, its culture, and its rhythms. It means arriving with some genuine curiosity about the way things actually work here, rather than expecting everywhere to operate on your terms. And one of the most immediate, visible, surprisingly powerful ways to signal that respect?
How you dress.
Style as a Form of Respect
This sounds more high-concept than it is. I’m not suggesting you need a full wardrobe overhaul before every trip or that you arrive anywhere in full national dress like an enthusiastic but misguided ambassador.
What I am saying is that understanding what people wear — in a particular country, city, climate, cultural context — and making a genuine effort to dress accordingly, changes the experience in ways that are genuinely difficult to overstate.
It’s become one of my favourite parts of the planning process. Researching a destination isn’t just about landmarks and restaurant lists anymore. It’s about understanding the people. The culture. The unspoken visual language of a place. And then asking yourself, honestly — does what I’m planning to wear show that I’ve made any effort to understand where I’m going?
Most of the time, the answer requires at least one online order.
The UAE Lesson
The clearest example I have of this came from travelling in the UAE.
Now, the UAE has a dress code. Not a suggestion — an actual cultural expectation, rooted in genuine religious and historical significance. Cover your shoulders. Cover your knees. Dress modestly in public spaces. This is not complicated information. It is, however, information that a surprising number of tourists choose to file under “optional.”
I chose to dress like the locals. Loose, modest, appropriate. Not as a reluctant compromise but as a deliberate choice — a quiet, visible acknowledgement that I was a guest here. That I recognised the history of the people and the significance of how they present themselves. That I hadn’t just arrived and immediately expected the culture to bend around my holiday preferences.
The shift was almost immediate.
The tourist tax — that invisible premium applied to anyone who looks like they’ve just stepped off a flight and has a convertible currency — quietly disappeared. Interactions with locals changed in quality. People spoke to me differently. Not because I’d fooled anyone into thinking I was from there — nobody was under any illusions — but because the effort had been noticed. A nod of respect, returned.
And then came the real reward. The restaurants that don’t appear on any listicle. The spots that exist entirely outside the tourist trail. The conversations that go somewhere genuine rather than stopping politely at the surface. The version of a place that only reveals itself to people who’ve shown some interest in earning it.
What You Wear Is What You Say Before You’ve Said Anything
Every destination has its own visual language and taking even a little time to understand it before you arrive pays dividends that go well beyond aesthetics. In some places that means modest clothing. In others it means ditching the sportswear and making a small effort. In Italy it means looking vaguely put-together at all times because the bar there is simply higher and everyone seems to have understood this except tourists in matching tracksuits.
The goal isn’t to costume yourself or pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s simply to arrive somewhere as a person who did a little homework. Who thought, even briefly, about where they were going and what that place means to the people who live there.
Do that, and the place tends to open up in return.
It’s a small thing. But in travel, the small things are usually where the best stuff hides.
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