Seersucker Before Easter? The Rules Behind Southern Fabric

April 3rd, 2015

This weekend you might be tempted to pull out your special striped blazer, but wait just a minute before you do. Apparently, there’s a general rule that you’re not supposed to wear seersucker – the puckered cotton suits – before the Easter holiday.

“The conventional thinking is, yes, Easter Sunday would be the first acceptable time to don your white linen and/or seersucker, and it should not be done before then,” said Ashton Greene, a salesman at H. Stockon, a traditional clothing store in the Atlanta area.

Greene said rules are meant to be bent, but he personally didn’t condone breaking the seersucker rule.

“Anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line, you best not have it on before Memorial Day,” Greene said.

Not all agree with the hard and fast rule, though.

“I let the temperature lead me,” said Sid Mashburn, designer and owner of Sid Mashburn, a men’s apparel shop based in Atlanta.

“Seersucker is a real combination of function and form because it’s great in hot weather,” Mashburn said. But he said if you’re a purist on rules, you’d also put the seersucker away by Labor Day weekend.

Mashburn said seersucker gained popularity in the South after a company in New Orleans known as Haspel, began selling the seersucker clothing in the early 1900s.

The puckered fabric makes it so that not all the fabric’s touching someone’s body, so there’s better air circulation, Mashburn said, making the fabric so popular in Southern summers.