Why We Call It a Tuxedo: A Field Guide to Black Tie

The Americans have a genius for taking an English thing, making it slightly more comfortable and then naming it after a place nobody in England has heard of. The tuxedo is the finest example.

In London it is a dinner jacket. In New York it is a tuxedo. In most hire shops it is a polyester tragedy with a matching waistcoat in a colour described as champagne. Today we deal with the first two and pray for the third.

In the late nineteenth century, formal evening dress meant a tailcoat. It was magnificent, demanding and entirely unsuited to a quiet dinner at home. Gradually, in fashionable English circles, a shorter, tailless jacket began to appear for less formal evenings, and the Prince of Wales, the same Edward who gave us the undone waistcoat button, was among those associated with it.

The jacket crossed the Atlantic in the 1880s and found a welcome at Tuxedo Park, a private enclave and club for New York society in the hills north of the city. Accounts differ on precisely who wore it first there and on which evening. What is not in dispute is that the members took it up, and that before long Americans were calling the garment after the place.

So the tuxedo is named after a country club. This explains a great deal about it, including its sense of occasion and its faint suspicion of anyone who arrives in the wrong shoes.

Black tie is a dress code, not a suggestion and certainly not a mood. It describes a specific set of clothes, and the beauty of it is that once you own them, you will never again have to wonder what to wear.

The jacket. Black or midnight blue, with peak lapels or a shawl collar faced in silk, either satin or grosgrain. One button is classic; double-breasted is equally correct. Notch lapels are what the hire shop calls a compromise and what I call a business suit at night.

The trousers. Matching cloth, with a silk braid down the outside seam. No belt loops. They are held up by braces, which no one will see, and which is the point.

The shirt. White, with a turndown collar and a front that is pleated or piqué. Studs are better than buttons. Cufflinks are required, not optional.

The bow tie. Black, silk, matching the facings if you can manage it, and tied by your own hand. The pre-tied bow is a lie told at the throat, and everyone at the table can read it.

The waist. Covered by a cummerbund, pleats facing up, or a low-cut evening waistcoat. The shirt should not appear between trousers and jacket. That gap is called the waistband, and it is nobody's business.

The shoes. Black patent leather, or black calf polished to the same degree of ambition. Plain-toe oxfords or opera pumps. Black silk or fine wool socks, long enough that no shin is ever seen.

Most black-tie failures are not failures of money. They are failures of attention.

The coloured bow tie, worn to "show personality." Personality is shown in conversation. The long necktie with a dinner jacket, which turns the evening into an awards ceremony for a regional sales team. The black shirt, which belongs to the waiters at a nightclub, who did not choose it either. The jacket that is two sizes too large because it was hired at the last minute from a rail. The cheap shine of synthetic cloth under good lighting.

And the wristwatch the size of a saucer. Evening dress was conceived for occasions when one is not supposed to be in a hurry. A slim watch is permissible. A dive computer is not.

The words on the card are a contract, and it is polite to read the small print.

White tie sits above black tie: tailcoat, white waistcoat, white bow tie, wing collar. If you are invited to one, you will be told, and you should comply exactly.

Black tie means what is described above. No interpretation required.

Black tie optional means the host will be in a dinner jacket and would like you to be. A dark suit is acceptable. A dinner jacket is the better manners.

Creative black tie means the host wishes to see a little imagination. Interpret this as a velvet jacket or a silk-faced shawl collar in a deep colour, not as a novelty bow tie bearing small cartoon reindeer.

In hot climates, a white or ivory dinner jacket worn with black trousers is a long-established alternative. It is elegant on a terrace and slightly theatrical in a January ballroom. Choose the setting accordingly.

If you attend more than one or two formal evenings a year, buy a dinner jacket. Hire clothes are fitted to no one in particular and worn by everyone in general. A dinner jacket you own, altered to your shoulders and waist, will serve you for decades, because black tie barely changes.

That is its great virtue. The dinner jacket is perhaps the only garment in a man's wardrobe that fashion has largely given up trying to improve. Lapels widen and narrow by small degrees, but a well-cut one from your father's generation would pass at any table tonight.

A uniform, worn well, is a form of freedom. Black tie removes the question of what to wear and leaves you with the only question that matters at dinner: whether you are any good company.

The tuxedo takes its name from Tuxedo Park, New York, where society adopted the tailless dinner jacket in the 1880s, and black tie has changed remarkably little since. That stability makes the dinner jacket one of the few garments where buying once and well is plainly the better economics. It also explains why hire shops and cheap synthetics persist: most men see black tie as an occasional obligation rather than an investment. The man who owns his dinner jacket, properly fitted, is the man who looks at ease at the table.

Until next week,

B.

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Forward this to a man who still thinks "creative black tie" means a bow tie that lights up.