Q: According to etiquette, can you wear linen after Labor Day?

A: Of course, if you're a dining room table. Maybe, if you're a person.

A linen blouse or shirt knows no season. A linen dress, skirt, jacket or pair of trousers still makes sense in very hot weather, at any time of year. (Linen fibers are tubular, so they wick perspiration away from the skin pretty efficiently.) But it's more complicated than that, because we use clothes not only to make ourselves comfortable, but also to locate ourselves in time and space.

We wear linen in summer in this hemisphere less and less to keep cool, since so much of our world is air-conditioned, and more to experience "summeriness." So we associate the crispness of linen with summer, and clothes made of linen tend to be designed to look summery. For instance, in April I visited a friend in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The weather was lovely -- it hasn't snowed in Argentina in a hundred years -- and you needed, at most, a light sweater or shawl. But Argentines on the street were bundled up in big winter coats and mufflers. It was fall, and they were dressed for fall.

When to wear linen isn't a question of etiquette, exactly. It isn't rude to wear a summer linen dress in January in Minneapolis. But it looks weird. You don't fit in. You look like you don't know what month it is, and that can worry other people.

Patricia McLaughlin is a nationally syndicated fashion columnist.
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