By MICHAEL CRIMMINS
Glasgow News 1
It might no longer be considered a fashion faux pas, but it’s not uncommon to hear that you can’t wear white after Labor Day. Where did this fashion tradition come from?
As might be expected the saying finds its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth with the elites of the Gilded Age, according to Vogue.
Labor Day, being the first Monday in September, serves as the unofficial end of summer and with the cultural end of summer comes also the end of vacations, the end of traveling, the end of carefree outings and a return to normalcy.
This was the case from the social elites who would retreat from the cramped cities for the entire season to “cooler places by the ocean, such as Newport or Southampton…pack[ing] in their trunks were wardrobes of white,” according to Vogue.
After Labor Day, when fall came, they would pack their whites away, safeguarding them from the dirty environs of the city — for example, Vogue wrote that back then, the New York City streets were made of dirt, covered in horse excrement and rotting garbage.
“[P]erhaps the time is nigh to issue a declaration: We don’t live in the Gilded Age anymore,” Vogue wrote in 2023. “Our streets are paved. Our trash is taken out. You can wear white after Labor Day.
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