It was a few minutes after noon on Thursday just outside the Senate Chamber, and the eyes of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) were twinkling with the magnanimous mischief of Santa Claus on Christmas. This was one of his favorite days of the year: the annual National Seersucker Day.
Wearing a green tie and a fine specimen from Haspel, the century-old New Orleans tailor who introduced the modern iteration of the seersucker suit, Cassidy extolled the virtues of the striped cotton fabric as a unifying force. “How often do you see Congress come together and actually do something, from the senators to the folks who are interns, from those who have been here for 30 years and those who have been here for 30 days, and actually participate from both sides?”
For Cassidy, the material is a savvy response to climate change. “It’s practical to wear seersucker,” he added, saying that 500 years from now, anthropologists will wonder, “‘Why did people wear wool on hot days? They should have been wearing this!’ So in a way, you learn to live with your environment as opposed to fighting your environment.”
Advertisem*nt
(One wonders how Cassidy is so confident of the eventual demise of civilization as we know it, but it’s comforting that there will still be anthropologists and they will study our sartorial choices.)
Skip to end of carousel
The Style section
Style is where The Washington Post covers happenings on the front lines of culture and what it all means, including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion, all told with personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here.
End of carousel
Seersucker Day dates back to the 1990s, when Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) would designate a warm June day as an occasion to don the striped cotton summer suits popularized in the South. A few years later, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) gifted several of her female colleagues seersucker suits in an act of feminist bravura: “I would watch the men preening in the Senate, and I figured we should give them a little bit of a horse race,” she once said.
In a 2014 resolution, then-representative Cassidy revived the tradition, partnering with Feinstein the next year when he joined the Senate to promote National Seersucker Day.
Following the death of Feinstein last year, Cassidy asked Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), who has participated since he was elected in 2021, to join him as co-chair of National Seersucker Day.
Advertisem*nt
“One, it looks great on him, right? I mean, he could be a model,” Cassidy said. But it also “preserves the bipartisan nature” of the event.
Why is clothing such an effective bridge for the two parties? “The more you share things, the more likely you are to trust each other. This is a point at which [you can say], ‘Hey, you look good!’ And maybe just subtly, that creates a better environment for future work together.”
A few moments later, seven senators, three Democrats and four Republicans, joined the co-chairs for a photo in their striped finest: Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).
Looking like a barbershop quartet (or nonet) that’s extremely picky about when it’ll harmonize, they grinned gleefully. A silly little outfit will do that to you.
Then a striated sea of staffers joined in for a larger photo. Some were in seersucker they’d had for years — a Warnock staffer in pants paneled with four colors of seersucker called his trousers “quad-partisan” — while others were wearing more recently acquired goods. One Cassidy staffer said he bought his suit after joining the senator’s office. “I’m from New Jersey,” he said, shrugging.
Advertisem*nt
After the photo op, Warnock said it was a moment to tout his bipartisan commitments, calling himself, as a Southern Democrat, “an endangered species, a rare thing. But I enjoy connecting with my colleagues, particularly those in the South,” he said. “It’s something fun for us to do, talk about — so that you see people beyond their partisan silos and engage with others as human beings, as friends.”
“There are people with whom I have deep ideological differences in this body,” he continued, “but they’re good people. Decent people.”
Warnock declined to answer who made his pristinely fitted suit, cackling and saying, “It’s the Warnock collection.” He wore a white satin tie and socks printed with the faces of his children. When asked how his new, more senior role in the proceedings had increased his responsibilities, he balked: “I mean, compared to national security?”
Seersucker may seem like simple stuff, but like so many garments across fashion history, it has a more complicated past. The name comes from the Persian words for milk and sugar — “shir” and “shakar” — and originated in India, with its crinkled texture derived from the speed at which the threads are fed into the warp. It was considered a breathable workwear staple until — in an act of usurpation similar to the fates of lobster and Carhartt pants — it was adopted by designers (like Haspel) and then by college students a century ago, becoming a prep staple. (“Lawn parties ensued,” Haspel’s website reads, as if preppiness were an unstoppable machine of frivolity.)
Advertisem*nt
For most of its history, it has been polarizing: Is it a dapper American fancy or a ridiculous costume of male frippery?
Regardless, the day creates a visual record of bipartisanship that can be otherwise difficult to see. Seven of the participating senators rank in the top 20 of the Lugar Bipartisan Index, which measures how often a senator co-sponsors a bill introduced by their opposing party, as well as the frequency with which their own bills are co-sponsored by lawmakers from the opposite party.
Perhaps it brings a semblance of graciousness to the contentious D.C. air. When asked who has better style, Republicans or Democrats, Cassidy raised an eyebrow, then smiled. “It’s the suit that makes the person,” he said.
