Somebody, at some point, decided you can't wear white after Labor Day. Nobody seems to know who. Ask around and you'll get the same shrug people give when a rule has been repeated so often that questioning it feels almost rude. So I looked into it anyway. Taste had very little to do with the rule. In the late 1800s, wealthy New Yorkers spent summers away from the city wearing white linen. When they returned as the season changed, they switched to darker clothes that hid the dirt and horse manure covering the streets. Old money turned that change into a quiet signal, a way to distinguish themselves from people who had recently made their fortunes and were still learning the unwritten rules. A fashion historian once put it plainly. Insiders were trying to keep people out, while outsiders were trying to prove they had learned the rules well enough to get in. Coco Chanel wore a white suit after Labor Day in the 1920s, one of the earliest known public examples of someone ignoring th...