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.