Remember, at one point,
'The Great Folk' used to wear white linen suits, and voluminous white dresses/pantaloons/bonnets, during summers. This was necessary, because all that hot clothing got sweated-up, quickly. The legendary 'Beauty Hauff Boyd', a fabulously-wealthy member of Mississippi's
'Third-floor Ballroom Class' (people who had ballrooms on the third floors of their mansions), used to bathe and change clothes, three times a day, during that state's endless and deadly-hot summers. Those clothes all had to be boiled and ironed. Obviously, white clothes were the only ones which could withstand such treatment.
Miss Mary Key, a beloved educator, remembered the remaining member of Belmont Mansion's Worthington family (
History of Belmont Plantation Established 1857), still, in the 1920s, wearing white linen suits, in summer.
(The famous Rosarian/Nurseryman Thomas Affleck 'Thomas Affleck' is a natural for Texas rose lovers - Houston Chronicle , ancestor of actor Ben, had his first nurseries a mile or so behind Belmont, and kept the River Road mansions stocked with blossoming exotics)
In summers, before the Civil War, the South's
Great Folk frequented the beach and mountain communities of the North. They were emulated at Saratoga, Newport, and Southampton. White for summer, became the standard, not only in the horrible climates of the American South, India, and Latin America, but throughout the Western World.
Egalitarianism
(thus the disappearance of the servants required for all that washing and ironing) and electric fans, caused changes in fashion. Yet, somehow, the writers of the books of rules, the books used by new money and immigrants, for assimilation into genteel circles, still
(needing SOMETHING to write down - otherwise they'd have empty books) kept right on writing about
"white clothes", oblivious to the fact that the original CUSTOM had to do with RESORT WEAR/summer clothing. The rule became ridiculously simplistic, and obviously should not have applied to layers of clothing
(such as men's dress shirts) which are most practical - and most flattering - in sparkling white-white, regardless of the season.
I LOVE wearing white cable-knit silk and cotton sweaters in spring and fall. I LOVE my white angora sweaters and sweater-dresses, in the dead of winter. White is my celebratory color, and I'm feeling extra-frisky, when it's cold. I love white corduroy jeans, with white sneakers, in January.
So really, I'd love to tell the writers of that rule, where they can stick it.
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