Photo credit: Courtesy of Dîner en Blanc
If you missed the Dîner en Blanc lavish affair at Carnegie Library held just before Labor Day, you’re out of luck. According to social etiquette, your white days are over thanks to Emily Post. Yes, it’s the silly season and you can’t wear white anymore, so pack it up and get over it.
Back in Emily’s day—the nineteen 00s, 10s and 20s—the summer season was bracketed by Memorial Day and Labor Day, according to Emily Post. Society flocked en masse from town house to seaside “cottage” or mountain “cabin” to escape the heat. City clothes were left behind in exchange for lighter, whiter, summer costumes. Come fall and the return to the city, summer clothes were put away and more formal city clothes donned once more. It was an age when there was a dress code for practically every occasion, and the signal to mark the change between summer resort clothes and clothing worn for the rest of the year was encapsulated in the dictum “No white after Labor Day.” And it stuck.
Photo credit: Creative Commons
According to others: “Of course you can wear white after Labor Day, and it makes perfect sense to do so in climates where September’s temperatures are hardly fall-like. Even in the dead of winter in northern New England the fashionable wear white wools, cashmeres, and down-filled parkas. The true interpretation is “wear what’s appropriate—for the weather, the season, or the occasion.” So on a blistering Indian Summer September day fashion icons just might be wearing white….yikes!
Tim Gunn of Project Runway says that all those rules need to go away. “All of them, absolutely. In fact, winter white is stunning, it really is.” We’re going with Gunn since we don’t have time to pack up our whites yet. Hollywood on the Potomac interviewed Tim at the Chefs for Equality event in Washington a few years ago. He’s definitely not into rules…..so in with the white.
Stephane Corrett, Tim Gunn and Ashley Levi at Chefs for Equality Photo credit: Andrew Dubbs
Dear Emily……………………..
