If so, what were the rules? Like, what month was it okay to wear white again?
Memorial Day (U.S.)
In South Georgia up until the 80s, this was strictly observed and mostly overseen by Older Iron Butterfly Ladies who gossiped and got hot flashes if you broke the fashion rules. I witnessed it as white clothes (especially shoes) being broken out for Easter Sunday. Going shopping for new Easter duds was always a big deal, and if you purchased white Sunday shoes 2 weeks before Easter you had to let them sit in your closet until THE DAY. I recall it being mostly measured by Sundays and what was worn to church. The Sunday before Labor Day was the last day you could wear white. After Labor Day you could wear “winter” things like boots and ponchos and darker colors. Suede was only worn in the deepest of Winter, which in South Georgia wasn’t exactly frigid.
There was such a thing as “Winter white” which was an off-white, usually worn by women in the form of a heavier wool or other woven suit or coat.
I like some of these rules, actually. There really was something to be said for everyone showing up on Easter Sunday in light pastels and whites after not seeing anybody wearing it for a while. It was like a breath of fresh Spring, like a renewal. We don’t have enough of these cultural rituals anymore.
Missed the edit window, but also wanted to add that the strictest No White rule was applied to shoes. You could wear your heavy Winter White coat in January, but never, evah, with white shoes. That’s just plain tacky.
I’ve never worn white pants in my life.
I was forced to wear white dress shirts as a child.
My dress shirts today have color. I don’t own a white one.
AFAIK I’ve never owned any white shoes. Except sneakers.
I guess I’m immune to the no white after… rule.
Cecil, I believe, reasoned white after labor day was not such an arbitrary thing. In the sivilized world, the weather deteriorates toward rainy/slushy/muddy after around labor day, so whites worn in those conditions will be spattered with mud and filth (yes, actual filth). And anyone who cares about appearances (and who cares more about appearances than gossipy Baptist fashion types?) will know that darker, and even earth tones, will compose a more season-appropriate ensemble.
As a first world anarchist, however, I refuse to wear white, or any clothing at all for that matter, until after Labor Day. During the summer I beat the heat by shaving myself bare as a baby and cruising around in the fine cool mist provided by my purpose-made mist spray-bottle. Try and drink THAT image out of your mind.
To be fair, I am mostly reciting the norms for women, and keep in mind I am recalling the 70s, when white shoes actually were a thing for men. Even then though, I think most men opted for tan shoes in the Spring/Summer. Men’s pants, well I know there was alot of powder blue and light green…and leisure suits. 
Nobody seems to know when or where or why the rule came into existence. Most websites eventually fall back on quoting the Time article Why We Can’t Wear White After Labor Day.
The article doesn’t limit white to shoes. It talks about white leisure wear, mostly in summer resorts. That’s how you know it was observed only by a certain small segment of society. Poor folks didn’t have a concept of leisure wear.
Men aren’t mentioned at all in that article. They did wear white in summer, especially tennis outfits, but also “ice cream suits.” Those were white summer wear, often of seersucker. Think what Tom Wolfe always wore. After your tennis game, you changed into a light-weight suit for the evening.
None of these concepts make sense today. Who puts on a white frock or a suit as casual wear? They’re part of a change in society that rose after the poor stopped being farmers and became factory workers. Before then, dark skin meant someone who worked in a field and white skin meant the non-working rich who got to stay indoors. By the early 20th century, the poor started to be pale because they worked 12 hours a day in factories, but the rich could afford to go out and swim and sail and ski and ride and do outdoor leisure so that tans became fashionable. A tan contrasted nicely against white clothing. Wearing white was one of a hundred markers of wealth and elite status, all of which had to be adhered to so that the poor couldn’t accidentally be confused if they had only one.
Where I grew up (Texas, 1950s) it was Easter.
Well, I can only say what my lived experience is and what I know. I think The Rule did begin from Elitism, but it evolved in separate communities as a ritualistic cultural norm, and that doesn’t make it bad thing.
I know it to be pretty widespread in rural Georgia (I say Georgia because that is what I have experience with) for the first big chunk of the 20th century. I do think a lot of it was church-based, because that is where most folks in those days made their fashion statements, and this includes weddings and funerals and the whole she-bang. And it didn’t much matter if it was a rich church or a poor church or a black church or a white church or any combination of the aforementioned, it was just something people did.
And I think most people seemed to enjoy it. After a while people consider ti important anymore, church got more casual and the practice has all but ceased to be.
Absolutely true.
In the fall of my senior year (1965) at a Catholic girls’ high school in Texas, we had a ceremony in October when we got our senior rings. We wore the white caps and gowns that we would later wear on graduation day. With white shoes–heels, of course. After the ceremony, there was a luncheon for the seniors and their moms (or mom substitutes). My good friend Mary Lou dutifully wore her white shoes during the ceremony and then changed into the other shoes she had brought, because there was no way in heck she was going to go into a public restaurant in the month of October wearing white shoes.
I still observe this rule–I can’t help it. I will make an exception for white jeans and white denim skirts, which I will wear any time of the year. <shrug> It’s just one of those things that gets in your blood at a formative age.
Yes! And this is also why the character of Eunice on the Carol Burnett Show got so many laughs in my part of the country. She was considered just eaten up with bad taste because of those ugly white shoes she wore all year, lol!!
I’ll stop posting so much in this thread after this, but this a subject that is really fun to talk about. I don’t come here to participate in the heavy conversations, I just lurk in those threads, but the abomination that is the wearing of white after Labor Day? I am all over that.
I remember women wearing white dresses, in the summer. It was very common at church services.
I was talking about the origins of the rule, a period that lasted until WWII. After the war, the middle class expanded hugely and started adapting the habits of the elite. The Time article I linked to explicitly mentions that. But they couldn’t possibly understand the hundred related markers I mentioned. They picked and choose a few they recognized and codified them. By the time they knew about wearing white, the elites had evolved a hundred new markers the middle class never saw and snickered at their bumpkin attempts just as they always had.
I never said any individual marker was bad. All societies have these markers and use them to define who is in and who is out. It’s the casting out of those who are different that always bothered me, and that’s true no matter what class or group was doing it. Etiquette is the science of making outsiders unwelcome; manners are the art of making outsiders comfortable. I hate etiquette. And that’s what “cultural rituals” are. I don’t miss any of them.
We could get really crazy and talk about wearing black at weddings…
Oh Dear Sweet Heaven! You really want to get me wound up, don’t you? I had an elderly Aunt whose face almost melted off the first time she went to a wedding and the bridesmaids wore black. I tried, to no avail, to convince her that it was alright because black is the most formal of colors, but she was not having any piece of it. :o
Easter is the cut off date you heathens!
Shocked!!!
The neighbor ladies all wore black when news broke of my Italian grandfather marrying my Irish grandmother, in '53. No joke. Came to my great grandma as if her son had died. Great Grandma didn’t care though.
Rose Muldoon: * GASP * A Guinea!
I grew up with all these rules. It feels weird to think about them, now that most of us dress in all-purpose comfort clothes, individual versions of those uniform stretch jumpsuits they predicted for our future.
Fashion used to change more with each season, too, and people tended to conform. I can look at photos from the '60s and '70s and tell what year it was by the clothes, shoes, and hairstyles.