Go on, it’s fine to flaunt old fashion rules
It’s become a bit of a Flashback tradition in late August to muse on fashion dictums past. For one thing, for folks of a certain age, the approach of Labor Day (this year Sept. 5) may bring to mind the old rule forbidding white shoes after this traditional marker of the transition from summer to fall.
Hemlines and white shoes
Also, about this time of year, even though so many years have passed since I grappled with back-toschool clothing needs, I remember the times when I did — especially the teen years when my patient mother and I grappled with the then-weighty issue of skirt lengths. How many inches from the floor should a hemline be?
Would you believe that, in 1953, the Gallup folks considered that question significant enough to poll about it? A resulting report in the Sentinel noted that first lady Mamie Eisenhower was standing firm and maintaining her “last winter’s skirt length of 13 inches.”
One of the legacies of the 1960s and ‘70s counterculture movement, it seems to me, was to blow the whole issue of skirt lengths right out of the water. In and out of the workplace, expectations and regulations about what we should wear — and when — are so much more flexible than they used to be.
Once, we had more rules about fashion, some tied to ideas of seasonal appropriateness. Before my freshman year at Florida State University, then still very much under the influence of its heritage as Florida State College for Women, I received a pamphlet bearing wardrobe advice, including the admonition to bring your “transitional cottons” to Tallahassee.
No matter how hot the weather, even in Florida one didn’t want to be caught wearing “summer” dresses after Labor Day, when darker, autumn colors prevailed.
In a Florida Department of Commerce photo snapped in Coconut Grove in 1959, the cusp of the 1960s, a model wears a crisp shirtwaist dress with gloves and pearls. It’s probably just what the FSU pamphlet writer would have called a transitional cotton.
“The classic shirtwaist is perennially a heavy favorite in collections by Florida designers,” the notes that accompanied the photo declared. The model’s gloves are white, but her shoes and Queen Elizabeth-worthy purse are dark — fine at the time to wear after Labor Day.
Year after year, the old “no white shoes” dictum continues to inspire media attention. Even the Farmers’ Almanac has weighed in, noting that “fashionista
Coco Chanel bucked this trend in the 1920s when she officially made white a permanent staple in her wardrobe.”
One theory traces the rule to old-money snobbishness in the early 20th century, when well-heeled folks escaped cities in the summer and donned light-colored clothing at fashionable resorts. “Along with a slew of commands about salad plates and fish forks, the no-whites dictum provided old-money elites with a bulwark against the upwardly mobile,” writer Laura Fitzpatrick notes.
Eventually, those upwardly mobile folks grabbed up the maxim and, by the 1950s, as the middle class expanded, the custom had calcified into a hardand-fast rule.
Bangs and buttons
If it’s hard to imagine looking fresh in August or September in a shirtwaist dress, it’s even harder to picture back-to-school fashions in Florida during the 1880s and 1890s, when dresses featured long sleeves and some girls sported stockings as well.
In her 1938 memoir, “Orlando in the Long, Long Ago and Now,” Kena Fries described a pioneer-days fashion trend that relied on the slate pencil she used to write on her school slate — the note-taking device of the time.
Older schoolgirls would heat up their pencils in the flame of a kerosene lamp and use them to “frizz” their bangs before going to school, Fries remembered. Another fad in the 1880s and 1890s involved creating “button strings.”
“Buttons were begged, traded, bought, and I fear sometimes simply appropriated from older members of the family’s garments. A button with a shank was worth three buttons with holes,” Fries wrote.
The button craze even turns up in one of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books, “Anne of Ingleside,” in which the narrator reports that “collecting buttons had broken out everywhere ... like the measles.”
No doubt young Kena Fries and the fictional Anne of Green Gables didn’t worry about wearing white shoes any time. They’re not the most practical attire. Now even Emily Post’s venerable etiquette guide says it’s fine to wear white after Labor Day. Don’t worry about your transitional cottons, either.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at joydickinson@ icloud.com, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter to Florida Flashback, c/o Dickinson, P.O. Box 1942, Orlando, FL 32802.