Beauty Mythbusters: Wearing White After Labor Day
Hola Amalah!
I’m a fairly new reader of your blogs, but that hasn’t stopped me from giving you my full attention and devotion. As such, I need some advice on the long standing “white after Labor Day” rule… and fast! My bridal shower is coming up in 2 weeks (Sept 30th), and I bought a really awesome white skirt suit (it’s a luncheon/tea) to wear, with high heel black patent leather peep hole shoes. I’ve been more excited about the outfit for the shower than my wedding gown! Ok, maybe not quite, but who wouldn’t be excited about a really awesome pair of peep hole heels!??! Anyway, an aunt and cousin recently asked me what I wearing to the shower and after hearing “white suit”, their jaws practically hit pavement.
I thought that was an old cliché, that no one paid attention to anymore, but apparently, I’ve been living in a pretend world of my own configuration. Can you help straighten us out please!? If white is out of the question, am I also not allowed to wear black? Because damnitall, I wanna wear those shoes! And, does it matter that I live in the Windy City at all? Does the white after LD only apply to winter weather prone states? Is it universal? Should I move to Vegas??
Color Cliché Challenged,
Di
PS: If you tell me to move to Vegas, I’ll be VERY happy!
For some reason I swore I already addressed the white-after-Labor-Day question, but a thorough search of the archives reveals that I was probably thinking of the entry about wearing white to weddings. Seriously, who knew white was so all-around controversial?
You are actually correct — wearing white after Labor Day is no longer the fashion faux pas it once was, with high fashion magazines and designers pretty much all thumbing their noses at the convention. Even etiquette experts admit that it’s hard to pinpoint why the rule existed in the first place. Was it because a lot of white clothing is summery and light and there were women who didn’t understand that you just don’t wear linen spaghetti-strap sundresses in December? Was there mass chaos in Paris when everybody started wearing white bikinis to the opera and SOMEBODY had to put a stop to it? Who knows, but about 99% of the etiquette and fashion guides out there today agree with you that it’s a silly and outdated tradition, and that white can be appropriate year-round.
(Interesting factoid: the oldest versions of the “rule” only referred to white shoes, and then somehow got twisted to include white fabric. So even today you’ll find more people who still follow and support the no-white-shoe rule, but see nothing wrong with white clothing.)
(Personally, I don’t really like the look of white pumps very much, so I’ve never been forced to give the whole thing much thought. I have white sandals and summery strappy heels, but they get retired when the weather gets chilly, and around here that’s…right after Labor Day. I once had someone chastise me on my blog over a photo of a pair of bone-colored sandals on an unseasonably warm day in the early spring, and I thought that was kind of a silly thing to fret over.)
You’re wearing black shoes, and your suit is perfectly appropriate for both the weather and the occasion. And it’s a bridal shower! And you are the bride! Brides! White! It just makes sense to me.
So the only sticking point is that two of your shower guests have made it clear that THEY still believe the convention is alive and well and proper, so I guess it’s reasonable to expect that other guests do too. So you can either show up with this column in your purse as your permission slip (that’s so Ann Landers!), or you just need to OWN that outfit and not let what anybody thinks rattle you or question it. You love it, there’s nothing wrong or inappropriate with it, to hell with everybody else. Which is always a good attitude to have when it comes to getting dressed.
(Unless you are wearing a white bikini to the opera. You might want to rethink that one.)
