Farrell: Lots of white pants at Heritage ... and it’s AFTER Labor Day (faint)

Here’s what happens if you wear white pants after Labor Day and before ... well, there’s some disagreement about when the annual expiration date of this rule is actually.

I’ve heard “no white before Memorial Day,” “no white before Easter” and “no white before Mother’s Day.”

There’s a line from the movie “Never Been Kissed” — in which Drew Barrymore plays Josie, a journalist who “goes undercover” at a high school — and it takes the rule even further.

On her first day of school, Josie nervously spills chocolate milk on her pants while trying to make nice with the popular girls in the cafeteria.

“That’ll teach me to wear white jeans after Labor Day,” Josie jokes.

None of the other girls laugh, though. Instead their social leader tells her, “I don’t think you’re supposed to wear white jeans after 1983.”

Burn. Good luck getting your “high school expose” now, Josie.

Back to my original point, though, here’s what happens if you violate the 100-plus-year-old fashion dictate that says white is for summer only:

Nothing.

Especially not at the RBC Heritage golf tournament on Hilton Head Island, where this year’s conspicuous fashion trend among women has been almost decidedly white pants … after Labor Day.

Nothing.

Well, OK. It’s not always “nothing.”

There’s still a contingency of women who feel the need to remind off-season white-wearers that their outfit choices break the rules of a civil society — even though Emily Post straight-up told the world in 2004 that the rule isn’t real. Even though Coco Chanel, who knew at least one to four things about style, never adhered to the guideline. Even though we live in the coastal South where we don’t have to worry about blending in with a blizzard.

I’m not sure what drives this fashion narc-ing, though.

The rule supposedly started among society folks in the late 1800s and gained popularity in the mid-1950s, when homemaking magazines had women packing up their white wear the day they returned to their city homes and unpacking them the day they returned to their summer homes.

Why it became a standard for everyone with just one house, though, is up for debate.

Maybe it’s one of those “if I’m abiding by this lame and fake rule, then I’m going to make darn sure others are too” situations.

Or perhaps these women think they’re helping the white-wearer avoid a possible ambush farther down the sidewalk, where the fashion police are waiting with a giant net and a syringe full of bromide to take violators back for the style reprogramming they clearly need.

Most likely it’s that they can’t “unknow” the rule. They can’t “unsee” the infringement. Just like they can’t “unsee” that image of their neighbor’s husband standing in his well-lit living room window wearing nothing but a bit of leopard print.

The impulse, either way, is to gasp and say, “This is not how we were taught to live!”

I walked up to a number of women at the Heritage on Saturday to ask them if they knew they were “not supposed to wear white after Labor Day.”

Each time, it felt like the setup for an insult. Like when you ask the person singing along to the radio, “Who sings this?” just so you can say, “Let’s keep it that way,” at whatever answer they give you.

“Have you heard the rule that you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day?” … “Then, why are you, friend?”

To sum it up: Everyone at Heritage knows. Hardly anyone cares.

“Strangers have said it to me,” Breiyan Woodall of Charleston said Saturday. “ ‘You shouldn’t wear white.’ ”

Does it matter what they think?

“No,” she said. “Not at all.”

She paired her crisp white pants with a Lilly Pulitzer top and a cardigan. She was zero percent worried someone might perceive the ensemble as her “not knowing any better.”

Chelsea Shuler of Charleston had the best rationalization for wearing white after Labor Day. “Every day is technically ‘after Labor Day,’ ” she said flatly.

It’s true!

Though every day is also technically “before Labor Day.” Whoa. I need to slow down.

Kate Philpott of Hilton Head wasn’t wearing white pants Saturday, but her friends Jennifer Kennington of Gainesville, Fla., and Caitlyn Lee of Hilton Head, proudly were.

“My brother! He’s told me I can’t wear white after Labor Day,” Philpott said, which caused the others in her group to be like, “WHAT?” and “That’s not a thing!”

“I asked him why, and he couldn’t answer that,” she said.

But seriously, Drew. Why can’t she wear white? Were you brought to us from the future in a time machine to save us from a fashion war?

Speaking of fashion wars, Sandra Wallace of Columbia has to sneak into her out-of-season whites or else she’ll hear it from her daughter, Calli, who resolutely believes that wearing white after Labor Day and before Easter is wrong.

“I do it anyway,” Wallace said. “We’re in the South. It gets hot here!”

After Wallace gets dressed in her secret white pants, she posts a photo of her outfit on Facebook … just so her daughter can see what a rebel she is.

“Oh,” her daughter said. “It’s highly against the law.”

This story was originally published April 16, 2016 at 5:45 PM with the headline "Farrell: Lots of white pants at Heritage ... and it’s AFTER Labor Day (faint)."