For the record, in America, there are only five dress codes that should ever be printed on an invitation. Formal, Semi-formal, Informal, Casual and Costume.

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Semi-Formal (or Black Tie) – Semi-Formal means  Black tie. Whether we call it a dinner suit or Tuxedo, it’s all the same. And this mean full on black tie right down to the cummerbund and shiny shoes. And a black bow tie! Always. No long tie, black or whatever. Ever.

Preach on, brother.

The hat is the ultimum moriens of respectability.

From: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. viii.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A cap, by the way, is not a hat.  It is a cap.  A hat has a brim that goes all the way around.  The fedora, the Homburg, the Trilby, the top hat, the Panama, the coke or bowler, those are hats.

There are rules about wearing hats.  The most basic rule about the hat is that if you’re unsure whether you should remove it or not you probably should.  The custom of tipping or removing one’s hat is said to come from the same place as the military salute.  In medieval times, knights would lift the visors of their helmets to show their faces as a sign of respect and their empty hands to show that they weren’t holding their weapons and therefore meant no harm.  It’s a custom that has persisted since that time.

A gentleman should remove his hat when he is indoors, except in those places that are equivalent to a public street or public location.  Such locations include lobbies and corridors of public buildings, post offices, malls and department stores and in the elevators of public buildings EXCEPT when a lady is present.  When a lady enters the elevator, the hat must be removed unless your hands are full of packages or the like and removal is impractical, in which case you should nod to acknowledge her.  Replace your hat when you exit the elevator and enter the corridor.

When you remove your hat, take care to hold it in such a way that only the outside of the hat is visible.  Consider the lining of your hat to be underwear, it should not be seen. (The same is true of braces or suspenders, by the way, they should never be seen.)

A gentleman removes his hat both indoors and outdoors when he is being introduced to a stranger or is saying goodbye to a lady or an elder.  It is removed when speaking with a lady, an elder or a member of the clergy.  In the United States it is removed during the playing of the National Anthem or when the American Flag is passing.  It is removed during funerals and the passing of funeral processions.  It may be removed when passing a lady on the street, but tipping (a slight lifting of the brim) is a quite acceptable substitute as a passing gesture.

It is considered to be an insult to tip your hat to another gentleman with whom you are not acquainted, it is akin to calling him a woman and is not done.  It is, of course, a sign of disrespect and the mark of a cad to leave your hat on when it would be proper to remove it.

Sometime soon I’ll write on the different types of hats and caps and when they’re proper to be worn.

Evening Wear

It seems to me that a good starting place is probably a discussion of what, exactly, we’re discussing and its history and etiquette.

First, the term “tuxedo,” as well as its even more vulgar cousin, “tux,” are singularly American in origin, coming to us from New York.  In 1886, New York socialites James Brown Potter and his wife Cora took a holiday in England, where they happened to meet the Prince of Wales at a ball.  The Prince invited the Potters to visit Sandringham, his estate in Norfolk, and when Mr. Potter inquired about the dress code there the Prince recommended that Potter visit his London tailor and purchase a “dinner jacket,” a short garment of his own design that he preferred to the tailcoat, worn with a rakish black bow tie.

Upon returning to New York, Potter wore his new dinner jacket to his gentleman’s club, Tuxedo Park.  There, several members including Pierre Lorillard (of the well-known tobacco products family) admired Potter’s new clothing a great deal, declared it to be more appropriate than the tailcoat for informal dinners, and had copies made by local tailors for their own use at the club. (One envisions the Drones Club at this point.)

One evening, several members of the Club went together wearing their dinner jackets to Delmonico’s, the only dining establishment in the city that didn’t require men to dress for dinner.  The Tuxedo Park gentlemen explained to the other diners who had never seen such a getup that this was how the members preferred to dress for dinner at the Club.  Thus, dinner jackets came to be known in the United States as “tuxedos.”

There was still a common understanding, however, that at any function where ladies were present the tailcoat was the expected form of dress, and that this new tuxedo, or dinner jacket, was only appropriate for stag events, such as dinner at the Club.

The aforementioned Pierre Lorillard, clearly a rake and a bounder, violated all known standards of decency by attending Tuxedo Park’s first Autumn Ball wearing his short jacket.  He was dismissed, of course, for being inappropriately attired, and the society pages of the newspaper reported that Lorillard “looked like a royal footman.”

Despite the indignity heaped upon Mr. Lorillard, the black tie dinner jacket, or tuxedo, if you must, grew in popularity and quickly supplanted the white tie tailcoat as the preferred dress for more formal occasions.

It is interesting to note that the concept of dressing for dinner was originally to change out of clothing worn all day when the primary mode of transport involved a horse, with the smell and grime that attends that form of locomotion and city life in general.  After the advent of the automobile, the custom remained as an indication of one’s refinement, always wishing to be as attractive as possible when meeting for social engagements.

The dinner jacket is always considered evening wear, it is improper to be worn during daylight hours, the only exception being when an event begins in late afternoon and is expected to last well into the evening.  Of course, in the summer months it doesn’t get dark until nearly 10:00PM, so etiquette experts have defined “evening” as beginning at 6:00PM or at dark, whichever comes first.

Obviously if a dinner jacket is inappropriate prior to 6:00PM, something else must be considered appropriate formal wear before that hour.  That something is morning wear, and we will discuss that in the next post.