Fight for your whites

I’m not exactly what you would call a fashionista.

My blindness to chic clothing choices, like so many things, probably stems from my childhood, when my firm placement in the social company of fellow geeks assured that my fashion sense didn’t really matter: I could dress as slickly and suavely as I pleased, but at the end of the day, I was still going to be holed up in the attic playing Risk all day against the kid with the lazy eye. At that point, it’s not like sweatpants and a Garfield T-shirt are going to contribute any noticeable amount of shame.

Of course, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been forced – by work, by societal expectations – to leave the sweatpants at home and make at least some kind of effort. That effort, while there, is still minimal. I’ve always taken a strictly practical approach to clothes: They exist, I reason, to prevent my nakedness. The guy at 7-11 probably doesn’t want to see me in my birthday suit, and besides, I need pockets to carry my Big Gulp change.

So admittedly, it’s with an outsider’s perspective that I question the fashion rules governing the choices of the more stylish among us. Perhaps the most well-known fashion rule, even among clueless schlubs like me, is the one that comes up every year around this time: Don’t wear white after Labor Day.

That’s what people always tell you. But they never tell you why.

Fortunately – I guess – I’ve never stopped being a geek, and so my Google-searching skills are tuned to the precision of a ninja master’s drop-kick. My fingers wagging with excitement, I took to the ‘Net, optimistic that I could solve the mystery of why autumn white is so taboo.

The answers I found were less than satisfying. Instead of finding the definitive origin I was looking for, I had to settle for a lot of theory and conjecture. Probably the best explanation I found, from “Timothy” at Yahoo! Answers, is that white tends to be cooler, temperature-wise. Darker colors absorb more heat from the sun, and so while white is an ideal color choice for summer fashion, donning it in cooling temperatures makes about as much sense as wearing a down jacket to a clam bake in June.

But while that’s a sound basis for a purely logical clothing decision, it still doesn’t explain why it has been decreed an official fashion rule by the taste-makers – those faceless shadows who smoke long cigarettes while stroking poodles and scoffing at things. I mean, when you see a guy standing outside in a snowstorm wearing shorts and a T-shirt, you don’t say, “My, what an odd fashion choice.” You say, “Wow, that guy’s an idiot and will die soon.”

Besides, the rule extends to accessories as well, and the colors of one’s accessories generally aren’t dictated by the weather. You don’t see a lot of people wearing white belt buckles to stay cool. If you want to extrapolate the no-white rule to its furtherst extreme – and many people do – then those observing it would be forbidden to wear white glasses, driving gloves, neckerchiefs, shoelaces, wristbands, socks, rings, and Breathe Right Strips. I wonder if the fact that I’m Caucasian is in itself a fashion faux pas.

Fortunately, the rule has been relaxed somewhat in recent decades. But every year, someone will remind you about it. I say rebel. I say, the next time someone haughtily informs you that fall means ix-nay on the hite-way, brazenly defy them by donning the most blinding outfit you can muster; heck, paint your face white and dress like the world’s brightest mime, if that’s what it takes. Because the rule is arbitrary, and it’s about time the fashion-conscious among us take back this most common of colors.

Not that I count myself among the fashion-conscious, of course. While you all are reclaiming white for the fall, I’ll be breaking out the ol’ sweatpants to see if they still fit. An outfit like that has got to be acceptable somewhere.