How Many White Skirts Do You Need? Sewing White Skirts for Every Season

White isn’t just for summer!  It’s a year-round wardrobe essential when you choose the right fabric. From crisp winter whites to airy summer styles, a well-made white skirt can carry you through every season with ease. In this post, Kasey leans into that idea with her white lyocell skirt, showing that white belongs in rotation all year.  If you’ve been limiting your whites, it might be time to rethink your approach.  See the Alabaster Collection here.

How Many White Skirts Do You Need?

As many as you can get different fabrics for….

I’ve made my latest white skirt from K4137 (OOP) in white lyocell twill (sold out).  It’s a simple, not -quite ¾ circle skirt with an elasticized waistband and self-drafted pockets.

Unfortunately, I forgot to make the pockets out of lining material instead of self-fabric–oops, lots of show through. But I can fix that! I could have removed the pockets and sewn on completely new ones (as I did for my pants in white lyocell, see that article), but I chose to be lazy and simply appliqued lining material to the side of the pocket against the skirt. Since it was habotai silk  it didn’t add much weight at all to the pockets and worked just fine.

I cut out two pocket shapes, used double-sided fusible tape to hold the fabric in place, then hand stitched the lining down around the edges. See–all fixed! And no more show through. But as a
precaution, the lining fabric now lives with the rest of the white lyocell in my stash so I hopefully don’t make that mistake again.

Did you know? According to Judith Martin – aka Miss Manners – the origin of the taboo against wearing whites past certain dates goes back to approximately the Gilded Age, when the well-heeled would not wear their “summer whites” outside of summer; this included certain types of white leather shoes, such as white patents. Note this doesn’t mean they didn’t wear white in other seasons, just that they wore heavier or different fabrics, saving extra-lightweight fabrics such as voiles, lawns, and light linens for the heat of summer.

Note also that most people at that time and for many years afterwards didn’t have “summer” whites, or probably whites at all besides a single white shirt (for men or women) to wear with their Sunday best, while wearing one other outfit the rest of the week with only changes of underclothes to keep the outerwear fresh.

In the 1890’s to early 1900’s, as more young women went to work and the “shirtwaist” style became more prevalent, women had a few more options for blouses to wear during the week, but still likely only had one or two, changing the cuffs and collars to keep clean as men did for their shirts. It wasn’t until the 1920’s that people had more disposable income, and access to more and more manufactured clothing that people started to have larger wardrobes, and older rules about what to wear and when got a bit twisted as they passed down through the decades. After more than a century of “telephone” for this advice, people keep to all kinds of permutations about this “rule”.

I myself like the original rule – if original it is, and who would gainsay Miss Manners? – that you should have summer whites, winter whites, and whites for every season in between, changing the weight of the fabric to match the season and occasion. I myself am on my sixth white skirt: one in white ponté, a six-panel in mid-weight linen, an a-line in lightweight linen, one in Swiss-dot batiste, one in a pinstriped ponté, and now one in white lyocell twill. And when Roz posts the next fabulous fabric in white, I’ll have one in that too!