THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 30, 1995 TAG: 9509300394
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Let us bemoan the demise of the seersucker suit.
Oh, well, one or two seersuckers are lurking in stores on hangers on the backs of doors that never close.
They will be uncovered years hence and deemed fossils.
So no more seersuckers are in the wild. A few survive in captivity in out-of-the-way closets of households.
But mainly the seersucker is on the skids, heading toward extinction.
Even in the Deep South, seersuckers are rare. I undertook a trip to Alabama recently with my mind set on finding a seersucker suit.
Birmingham boasts a Rich's store, an offshoot of the parent company in Atlanta. The manager said he hadn't been able to find a seersucker all summer.
I reeled. No seersuckers!
Why, you knew summer had arrived when your father put on his blue-and-white-striped seersucker.
Later, brown and white stripes came in vogue; but elders said they'd sooner wear a croaker sack than a brown and white seersucker.
Seersuckers came pre-rumpled. They had so many wrinkles when new that nobody could tell when they were wrinkled from wear and tear.
They were loose, and they were cool, being run up out of cotton, and you didn't have to worry about them getting wrinkled when no room was left to add wrinkles.
You have heard of wrinkle-free clothes? Original seersuckers were wrinkle-full. The cotton cloth had a puckery feeling you couldn't iron out even if you tried. So the first seersuckers were shapeless.
They hung on you as if draped limp and loose on a newel bed post. All summer, men looked cool and frumpy and felt born free.
They hung on to shapeless jackets as if they were life preservers. Grown men couldn't carry security blankets, but the seersuckers served just as well.
Harold Sugg had a brown and white striper of which he was inordinately fond. One day, Bob Mason was saying recently, Sugg spilled homemade fig preserves on it. The cleaner couldn't remove the stain, so Harold said dye the whole thing.
``What color?'' the cleaner said.
``Fig color,'' said Harold. It didn't look right, but Harold clung to it as Linus does to his blanket.
Manufacturers finally blended synthetic fibers with the cotton so that the seersucker could take a crease. Instead of a nice soft look, the seersucker took on a sheen, as if Simonized.
They were, a farmer told me, ``half cotton, half rotten.''
Former Gov. Colgate Darden loved the wrinkles. He said they lent character to a suit much as they do to an old man's face.
Traveling in South Carolina, he and two young state officials found a general store that sold seersuckers at $17 each. Darden bought two, satisfied they would last forever.
One day his younger brother, Pretlow, lured him downtown and bought him a new seersucker. The governor was aghast when he learned it cost $200.
And it didn't have any wrinkles, either. ILLUSTRATION: Color staff illustration by Janet Shaughnessy <
by CNB