Labor Day is perhaps the saddest holiday of them all.
Even the name connotes drudgery, pain and hardship, especially if you’re female. The dreaded date in early September signifies the end of summer, going back to work or school and, worst of all, rearranging your closet so that white dresses, jeans, shirts, shoes and purses are out of sight and mind.
Okay, the last part is a little extreme. But I can’t help it; it’s ingrained. I confess that I was raised by Hollywood fashionistas. My grandmother owned a high fashion boutique not unlike the one where Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable worked in How to Marry a Millionaire. You walked into a salon, told the sales professional what you were seeking - say an evening gown for an awards ceremony or a new wardrobe for a cruise - and soon the models strutted down your own private runway, clad in all available options.
Nana wouldn’t receive my sister and I if we, perish the thought, were wearing white patent leather Mary Janes after Labor Day. That might sound harsh, but the upside was that Nana often gave us outrageously expensive designer clothes and insisted on buying us trunk loads of elegant classics when we went away to college. I still own, and wear, some of Nana’s purchases.
Then there was my great aunt, one of Nana’s closest friends, who worked as a studio costumer. Aunt Sue was decked out in turbans, long false eyelashes, huge golden hoop earrings and the latest in plastic surgery until the day she died, at age 96 (she didn’t look a day over 70). She took glee in sharing Marilyn Monroe’s more intimate fashion tips. “After all, she was the sexiest woman who ever lived,” she told us.
According to Aunt Sue, Marilyn wore everything one size too small, so that she would appear to be on the verge of bursting out of her clothes at any moment. Tight outfits gave Marilyn an aversion to underwear, because Visible Panty Line (VPL) is definitely NOT sexy. My aunt knew all this because Marilyn had very little confidence in her ability to dress herself and would often roll out of bed, then run down to my aunt’s wardrobe department, to be dressed in the appropriate attire for lunch with a studio executive or an interview with a journalist. Aunt Sue often had to scramble after Marilyn’s famous studio closet raids, because the diva would insist on wearing the dress some other actress was slated to wear in a film that day.
So you combine the fashion influence of my grandmother and my aunt with that of my ex-model mother (she used to display fashions in my grandmother’s store), and you have one extremely paranoid dresser with classic taste. Even though the Wall Street Journal’s Style section told me yesterday that because of almost universal climate control, I can now wear "white jeans year round.” I just can’t bring myself to do it. This weekend, the white jeans and sheer cotton drawstring pants are being relegated to the bottom of the jeans drawer.
As far as I’m concerned, there is only one place here in Southern California where you can dress the same way year round, partly because it’s always dark there so no one really notices what you wear. That place is the private screening room circuit, where it is always winter. My colleagues and I speculate why critics’ screenings are always air conditioned to teeth chattering levels, and all we can surmise is that the publicists who arrange them don’t want us to get too comfortable and fall asleep, thus missing any of the good parts.
As cold as these screening rooms get, however, there is one fashion legacy left to me by my Nana that never gets rotated into the wardrobe line-up. That would be a closet full of Dicker and Dicker furs (that’s one of the Beverly Hills critters, above). Even if it were chilly enough to make wearing them comfortable, I would fear the wrath of the animal rights activists who didn’t exist in Nana’s day.
I guess some rules of fashion do change with the times. But for me, the taboo against wearing white after Labor Day is not one of them.
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