Wear white after Labour Day
Every year, as summer starts its slow wane into fall, someone pulls me aside and with great concern asks if they really can’t wear white after Labour Day. It is as if this rule has some kind of magical power behind it, that perhaps when your skin comes in contact with white fabric after that first Monday in September you will break out in hives. Or, just as likely, that others will look at you in disdain and disgust. I find it especially amusing that even in our liberated age, when many declare that they can wear whatever they want, some antiquated rules of dress survive. Whereas other dictum have faded with the changing times – like “no brown in town” which segregated country wear from city wear – this rule somehow lives on in our subconscious.
I am fascinated by the history of menswear and so when it comes to understanding a rule of dress or how something is worn, I always look to the past to try to understand its origins. My research often reveals that behind what may seem like arbitrary nonsense is reasoning and thought. And there were indeed reasons for the “no white” rule even though many don’t apply any more.
In late 19th and early 20th century America, when the moneyed classes vacationed for the summer, they would put away their dark, heavy wool clothes in exchange for lighter garments of linen and cotton. Not only were these more comfortable in the heat of summer, white acted as a status symbol. Being hard to clean in the days before mechanised laundering, white showed you could afford to have your clothes washed more often. Come Labour Day, however, these folks would return to work and don the uniform of the city: dark suits in worsted wool or serge.
And while present society is thankfully free of these class structures and the need to uphold them, there is one small grain of logic in the “no white after Labour Day” rule: dress for the weather. Put simply, light coloured clothing is more comfortable when it’s hot outside as it reflects the light instead of absorbing it. Conversely, dark coloured clothing is much easier to clean and maintain through the rigours of winter than light coloured (even with our fancy mechanical laundering machines). And so while I don’t follow the Labour Day rule to the word, I have almost no white clothes in my winter wardrobe (save for shirts). However, I don’t adhere to the arbitrary nature of when I do my wardrobe swap. Instead, I base it on the weather.
And in this sense, I am following the rule to a certain degree. What I like about swapping wardrobes is that they act like chapters in your life, in this case signifying a change of season. Pegging the change to Labour Day makes little sense, however, in a global culture. Weather patterns are so unique it is up to folks in each region to figure out when summer is over and it’s time to put away the linen.
As I write this, a few days after Labour Day, Toronto is experiencing yet another heat wave. It would be foolish, if not dangerous, to abandon my summer wardrobe. So I will keep my white linen pants and Cuban guayaberas on call for a few weeks more until the weather, not an antediluvian rule, tells me it’s time to move on to tweed.
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