Before Seersucker Was Southern, It Was Indian

On the second Thursday of June every year, something strange happens on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Congress members who spend most of their working lives in navy wool appear on the Senate floor in blue-and-white stripes, looking almost like a catalogue shoot that got lost on the way to Martha’s Vineyard. The city’s suit shops stock up. Yes, dear friends, it’s National Seersucker Day, ordained by Senate Resolution 254, and — if you squint — it’s one of the last reliably bipartisan rituals left in U.S. politics.

The 2025 resolution is vast, explaining how the “breathable,” “hot summer month” fabric — derived from the Persian “shir-o-shakar,” meaning “milk and sugar” — arrived in the American South in the mid-1800s, where 3,500 Georgia cotton family-farms helped produce it. However, the resolution never mentions where the fabric comes from, or the enslaved people who helped make it in the U.S. The real story of seersucker isn’t American at all. Instead, the cotton fabric shows us what America remembers, and then chooses to forget.