Nobody knows who made the rule. There’s no founding document showing us there was an etiquette board that convened in 1903 and took a vote. No one has found evidence of a memo that was circulated among the summer houses of Newport announcing that white linen would be retired on the first Monday in September. Historians have theories of course, and the most persuasive one has very little to do with fabric weight or autumn mud.
White was what you wore when you weren’t working.
You wore it when you had somewhere cooler to be for three months and no particular reason to think about what a day’s labor does to a hemline or the cuffs of your pants. This rule that ended the season became a way for the people already inside the room to sort out who shouldn’t be allowed to enter the room. You either followed the rule or you didn’t — and knowing who didn’t, or couldn’t, follow the rule was entirely the point.
The rule has now outlived its own explanation by roughly a century. Vogue has pronounced it dead more than once. Every September though, somebody’s grandma still says something about people who shouldn’t be wearing white shoes.
I think about this a lot at work. But not because of the shoes.
The Unwritten and the Unexplained
Every organization I’ve been part of has carried a set of rules whose origins were lost in the same way — not written down anywhere anyone can find, not defensible under even gentle questioning, and enforced with a gravity wildly out of proportion to anything at stake.
The expense threshold set at $25 because of an incident in 2011 concerning Rory from Facilities that nobody can describe but everybody vaguely remembers. The dress code prohibition on open-toed shoes at a corporate office where the primary hazard is the carpet. The standing rule against scheduling anything before 9:30 AM, which has now survived by five years the departure of the executive who wasn’t a morning person. The PowerPoint template with the mandated shade of blue and the very specific hex code that’s not even in the company logo.
Ask about any of them and you’ll get a pleasant answer with no defensiveness whatsoever (because nobody really feels the need to defend anything). After all… “It’s just how we do it here.” (shrug)
But… whatever these rules were originally built to do, what they do now is sort and separate people.
Who Followed and Who Didn’t
Learning these types of work rules is how you demonstrate you’ve been around long enough to have learned them, and following them without comment is how you signal that you’re one of us. Which is why the new hire who asks “why do we do this?” is being more disruptive than she realizes. She isn’t challenging the rule so much as pointing out that there’s no there there and nothing is holding it up. And no one wants to hear that.
Now HR is not an innocent bystander here; we’re frequently the ones who wrote the rule down and memorialized it. Somebody did something ill-advised and a policy got drafted in response. The policy then outlived the person, the circumstance, and eventually anyone’s memory of why it had seemed necessary. And now it continues to survive in the department SOPs or the employee handbook — seemingly forever.
The complication is that not every unexplained rule is a white shoe in November; some of them are substantive and necessary. The requirement that feels most arbitrary is occasionally the only thing standing between the organization and a regulator, or between the organization and something genuinely bad that happened once and has not happened since. The challenge is that from the outside, structural and decorative look identical. Both are inherited, both go unexplained, and telling them apart takes more effort than we often bargain for.
Because without that discernment, we keep these rules — often for the same reason the white shoes go back into the closet come Labor Day. Not because anyone can explain them, but because asking about them may cost more than complying.
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