Seersucker season
Next Thursday is Seersucker Day! Tradition ordains Memorial Day as the beginning of summer, when seersucker is great to wear if you want to look sharp for a change.
Read time: about 7 minutes. This week: Very seasonal seersucker for the summer. Next week: A brief excerpt from my current book project. A piece on two images (one old and the other more recent), cars, and the transformative power of glamour. After that, it’ll be break time for me ’til July 7!
Memorial Day signaled the beginning of summer, and thousands — maybe millions — heeded the call of sun and air, often with an abandon that felt rich and new after being socially distanced for months. It also is a traditional day for seersucker-loving men and women, signaling when men can again look like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird and women can feel carefree-fresh in summer’s heat. For the past few years, a few of the seersucker crowd at Duke University have gathered to share a meal, talk some shop, and preen in seersucker a little. It’s our annual “Seersucker Seminar,” unfortunately postponed in 2020 and not yet resurrected. Who knows, maybe a face-to-face seminar might happen in the future; I’m not a Zoom-luncher.
The specific day when seersucker might appear on the street is, of course, as debated as any rule so weighty and commanding. Rule-bound etiquetteers say that no one north of the Mason-Dixon Line should wear seersucker before Memorial Day. Those south of the line can be released from winter’s blues and grays on Easter, which seems an even more equivocal date to me, happening as it does on a wide range of Sundays, March to April. I’m not strict about what I choose from my closet, but I do think that a Memorial Day kick-off for seersucker makes sense, even though I live in North Carolina, far south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Besides, it’s also the traditional beginning of summer.
Seersucker season, whenever it begins and ends, has been celebrated more-or-less regularly since 1996 at the US Capital, and seersucker even has its own national day. Former Majority Leader Trent Lott started “Seersucker Thursday” in 1996 when he was a Senator from Mississippi, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) joined in 2004. “I would watch the men preening in the Senate,” she said, “and I figured we should give them a little bit of a horse race.” She succeeded by getting eleven of the fourteen women Senators to take part the next year. The tradition has continued with “National Seersucker Day” that Senator Bill Cassidy, MD (R-LA) last announced for June 13, 2019, and that has been occasionally held. No word on this year’s day for the Senators, though Haspel lists the “national” day as June 9, 2022. There’s a party at the Four Seasons Hotel in New Orleans, by the way — seersucker required, of course.
The decision to garb in seersucker or not has to do with ceremony and the cycles of tradition, both of which have taken a hit during pandemic. It also points out that fashion and style also gently regulate our lives so that we know where (and even who) we are.
Seersucker story
My bride and I headed to a fancy-pants affair one summer evening before the pandemic. We had cut short our weekend chores to get all duded and dolled up, and my list-making wife planned a side trip to Lowes to pick up some supplies. We went there en route to the soirée — I in my seersucker suit and bowtie, she in a nice dress, glistening just so with the fine magic that already beautiful women can conjure with brushes, make-up, and jewelry.
It was a little like being Santa and Mrs. Claus in a mall, as we stood together among insecticides, chain saws, outdoor grills.
“Oh, I just love a man in seersucker! So bold!” exclaimed a middle-aged woman with a northern accent. I suspect I blushed a bit, and my wife pulled me slightly closer. “Why don’t men do that anymore? Or as much, at least?” she asked.
I don’t know how I responded, but I do know we gathered our stuff and headed out. Another lady quietly complimented the seersucker in the cashier’s line. “So cool in summer,” she said with approval.
Well dressed women at one time did get compliments about attire, I know. Men get far fewer, but seersucker is flashy, I’ll admit, especially when you’re standing in an aisle at a big box lumber yard.
That interaction at Lowes points to a truth of clothing: The substance of style and fashion is a lot about other people, not the wearer. Wearing a seersucker suit provides some comfort in summer’s heat, of course, but it also shows respect for those we chance to meet. It is a signal that others pick up. I suspect the loud lady praised the seersucker because it was bit of a treat in the light bulb aisle.
As a signal, fashion discloses ways of interaction, laying out behaviors that fit the fashion and creating a greater sense of location. Fashion sets a stage, so to speak. Jumbling signals by overdressing at Lowes lays bare this function. (Fumbling it also has raised questions about celebrity and Instagram “influencers.” Do they even matter if the stages they set up are so alien to all of us?)
Believe it or not, your button-down shirt might matter
We have more trouble mounting the stage after the isolation and weirdness of a post-pandemic world, because the stage is never set — or, rather, the stage is set for a very small theatre and the scenes never change. On the cramped stage of the past couple of years, we saw even more clearly how fashion functions to regulate and shape social life.
It was more obvious because, well, it was absent or obscured in endless monotony.
Of course, there were benefits, perish the thought: We wandered among our closest partners and friends and family in comfortable robes, sweatpants, pajamas or T-shirts and underwear. For the working among us, over time — actually quite short a time — the loungewear (or underwear) edged itself into Zoom’s focus. (Perhaps only from the waist down.)
In the midst of the isolation, we found that work wardrobe helped to punctuate the days and separate work days from weekends and holidays. When every day is a robe day, weeks became a mish-mash of days and hours, and we became less apparently clued to our role (or even our identity) than when we wore pre-pandemic “business attire” — whatever that happened to mean in Formerly Normal Times — and entered into morning rituals of grooming and, yes, commuting.
One morning in winter 2020 as I was dressing, I confessed to my wife that the sameness of pandemic days was getting to me. “It’s like being in Groundhog Day,” I sighed, repeating the words that had been uttered many times by many others. Her wise response? She looked at me as I stood mostly clad in my old jeans and a wrinkled button-down shirt and said: “Once a week, you need to dress up like you used to. Bow tie. Pressed shirt. All the way down to your shoes.”
Dress Down Friday in reverse: Dress Up Friday to greet a weekend.
It gradually became a part of the rhythm of work-at-home, though there was nothing to be done about the regimentation of Zoom. My colleagues saw the bow tie and noted the pressed shirt — all parts of my identity as a co-worker — and they were amused. The ironing, rather than being a chore has become a means of renewal and a setting of the stage and of a different pace and role. Even pressing a button-down became a gesture to honor friends and remind them (and myself) that things would indeed come back in time, certainly transformed.
What happens now?
Thinking of life after the tribulations, Adam Pally said, “One of the things historically that happens in fashion after catastrophic events is there’s a bunch of opulence, like in the Roaring ’20s. I feel like that will happen. You will see a ton of cashmere. People will reach for their tuxedos and wear fur again and they won’t care.”
I confess it. I tried to luxuriate in cashmere while in pandemic isolation, but it wasn’t nearly as good as luxuriating with friends wearing cashmere. We’re not in the Roaring 2020s yet, but there are inklings that people want to don clothes that have hidden in the back of the closet. We need a couple of occasions. Maybe Seersucker Day is one of them.
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Tags: seersucker, fashion, men’s fashion, women’s fashion, seasonal wear
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Amusing and informative blog post. McKay, Brett, and Kate McKay. “How to Wear a Seersucker Suit.” The Art of Manliness (blog), April 30, 2015. https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-to-wear-a-seersucker-suit/. “A Missouri state legislator proposed a ban on anyone over the age of eight wearing one, because, he scribbled in a handwritten amendment, ‘adults look ridiculous in seersucker suits.’” Well!
Well, they used to do some things in bipartisan fashion. Baker, Richard A. “U.S. Senate: Seersucker Thursday.” United States Senate. Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/SeersuckerThursday.htm.
That Senator Cassidy did the announcement is no surprise, since seersucker was born in New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century by Haspel, a haberdasher still offering really nice seersucker suits. “Cassidy Announces June 13 as National Seersucker Day | U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.” Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.cassidy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cassidy-announces-june-13-as-national-seersucker-day.
Textile politics. Taylor, Jessica. “#TBT A Brief History Of (Political) Seersucker.” NPR.org. Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/11/413657641/-tbt-a-brief-history-of-political-seersucker.
We’ll see how this pans out. Gallagher, Jacob and Rory Satran. “No More Sweatpants: What We’ll Wear Post-Pandemic.” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2020, sec. Life. https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-more-sweatpants-what-well-wear-post-pandemic-11590166062.
Ties, too. Don’t forget. Plummer, Todd. “Are Ties Really Dead?” Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-ties-really-dead-11652211719.