The One Thing I Don’t Wear After Labor Day (and it’s not white)

Sayonara until next summer to this white dress &  another piece of clothing I truly adore.

Summer has well & truly ended, with children ensconced in schoolrooms, the weather (mercifully) cooling, and peaches & tomatoes making their annual exits from the market. (Le sigh.) It’s bittersweet, this return to schedule & order, the loss of summer’s sweet chaos. No two summer days are the same, and that’s both the challenge & also kind of the point?

This autumnal order exacts itself in all manner of ways — our daily routines, our social calendars, even our closets. White apparel is notoriously eschewed after Labor Day, a time-honored rule reserving white for the period between Memorial Day & Labor Day. (So basically, summer only, you hobos!) It’s a rule with origins steeped in practicality & class (Vogue does a great write-up here), many of which no longer apply to modern life.

Which begs the question: are we really not wearing white after Labor Day? According to my Instagram poll (in the name of SCIENCE), more than half of you give zero f**ks & think this silly rule is outdated. A distinguished minority will be clutching their pearls when they see you wearing a white dress in October. A much larger minority observe what I like to call the White Denim Exception, in which you follow the No-White-After-Labor-Day rule with a special exception for white denim (which can be a clutch piece especially during shoulder seasons).

Where I land on this particular question has evolved over the years. When I lived in San Francisco & our warmest, prettiest weather happened in September & October, I followed an Indian Summer Exception of my own invention. White denim has always felt like a year-round piece to me wardrobe-wise (the Mother Hustler Ankle Fray is my go-to pair), though they can feel a little too jarringly, optically bright in the dead of winter. I adore a cozy winter white (these Mother Half-Pipe’s are my current favorites), and now preferentially wear winter white denim during late fall & winter. Mixing white & cream is also a lovely way to ease into fall, as demonstrated by every Nancy Meyers’ movie heroine ever. (I also loved this inspiration board from Becky Nielsen Interiors).

But I do try to observe a hard-and-fast rule for one piece of clothing: denim cut-offs, which I wear with abandon allllll summer long & then retire to deep storage until the arrival of the sooner of 1) hideously hot Southern weather or 2) Memorial Day. There is something so profoundly, languorously casual & relaxed about cut-offs, the ethos of summer distilled into a single piece of clothing. They feel so right tossed over a swimsuit as you rush out the door to the beach & suddenly so wrong once the leaves start to turn.

But that can leave a gap in one’s wardrobe, that time between summer’s end and Fall’s proper chill, when a casual short could really come in handy. Enter this polished, pleated pair of Veronica Beard denim shorts, which can be worn with a white button-down blouse or bateau mariniere just like a cut-off but with more fall-appropriate polish. They’re exactly the sort of thing you need to dress for early fall (especially for my fellow warm climate dwelling friends). Have & LOVE, so prepare to see me in them as long as the summer tan on my legs lasts!