Senate’s seersucker tradition perseveres

Just when the Senate seems to be losing its sense of clubbiness — one-sixth of its members are women, and outsider candidates are running for seats this fall — along comes Seersucker Thursday.

Once a year, preferably on a “nice and warm day in the second or third week of June,” according to the Senate’s website, senators don their striped suits, turning one of the world’s most august bodies into an apparent conclave of ice cream vendors.

It makes for an incongruous snapshot: What are New Englanders like Sen. Susan Collins (R- Maine) or Westerners like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) or Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R- Utah) doing in that Southern standby, seersucker?

“Southerners know heat, and I will admit this is comfortable,” Collins said as the temperature outside crept into the muggy mid-80s.

Traditions do not die easily, but sometimes they do fade away. Just 10 senators gathered Thursday for the 2010 group photo, down from what Trent Lott, the former Republican leader who started the tradition in the 1990s, said was a high of 26 suits some years ago.

Lott, a Mississippian who now is a lobbyist representing oil companies, among other interests, was not dispirited as he strolled the halls Thursday in seersucker, slapping the backs of old friends and adversaries and gleefully displaying his powder pink socks.

The former senator said he had sought to bring “levity and lightness” to the chamber when he first injected the dose of Southern style.

“It’s just fun — and so much isn’t,” said Feinstein, who bought suits for the rising number of women senators as they broke into the old boys’ club some years ago.

Seersucker suits rose to popularity in the 1950s with the birth of the suburban leisure lifestyle, said professor Linda Welters, chairwoman of the department of textiles, fashion merchandising and design at the University of Rhode Island.

Now, in the 21st century, seersucker conjures a bygone era of rocking chairs, sweet tea on the front porch, and genteel conversation.

That came into focus in one of those odd Beltway moments when Academy Award winner Kevin Costner, who had testified Thursday on Capitol Hill on the gulf oil spill, crossed paths with Lott.

The former senator thanked the actor for his work on the spill and then suggested, “You need to get your seersucker outfit.”

“It’s a handsome look,” Costner offered.

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com