Dinner Suits Formal Attire etc

[Marc Chevalier]

I say evening suit. It gets around the mortally controversial 'dinner suit' vs. 'matching dinner jacket and trousers' bloodbath.

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[Flitcraft]

As usual....

Well put, Mr. Chevalier!

 

[Topper]

I say evening suit. It gets around the mortally controversial 'dinner suit' vs. 'matching dinner jacket and trousers' bloodbath.

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Was just poiting out the correct version, when ever someone mentions dinner suit take it they are inferring an ensemble of a black dinner jacket and black trousers. For convention it sometimes is easier saying Dinner Suit, and to my knowledge there is no definition of Evening Suit in old school etiquette so would agree with you on that Marc.

Pip-Pip
Doug

 

[Mr. Rover]

See, to get a dinner jacket made, I'd ask if they had some really blacker than black blacks (or midnight) in wool fresco and see how I liked it.

I think my uncle had one made for DC Design using wool fresco, maybe it was just a high Super, but the pants have problems with puckering where the grosgrain meet the wool, because the grosgrain was too much heavier than the wool. Just a tip...

 

[Undertow]

I prefer a plain black wool evening suit with satin peak lapels, nice crisp marcella shirt, black bow tie and cummerbund (I get warm often) and patent leathers. I like to keep things simple.

Although I think my picture shows me in a red bowtie. I was feeling frisky.

 

[Orgetorix]

I prefer a plain black wool evening suit with satin peak lapels, nice crisp marcella shirt, black bow tie and cummerbund (I get warm often) and patent leathers. I like to keep things simple.

Although I think my picture shows me in a red bowtie. I was feeling frisky.

I think your picture also shows you in notch lapels, doesn't it?

 

[Undertow]

I think your picture also shows you in notch lapels, doesn't it?

Yes. How I long for the peak lapel! I found that tux on sale for a pittance. Former rental, only worn once, Jones New York, 100% wool, already fit me out of the box, and included a black satin bow tie and cummerbund, both new. The entire set cost me somewhere around $90. Of course I jumped on it and figured I would eventually buy a peak lapel seperately.

I bought the red bow tie and cummerbund because I wanted to be festive. It was my company christmas party.

 

[Anthony Jordan]

My preference has always been for a high-ish buttoning 4x2 double-breasted black worsted with silk grosgrain peaked lapels. Fortunately they are relatively easy to pick up over here and I have had a number over the years. Worn with fairly wide-legged worsted trousers with a single braid stripe down the leg, black braces, fine black lisle hose, white silk handkerchief, single-ended silk barathea self-tie bow tie and black patent shoes. I used to favour the stiff plain-front dress shirt with detachable wing collar when I was wearing black tie regularly but now would probably also try a pique front with a matching turndown detachable collar or even a silk pleated-front with an attached collar for variety. I used to have a couple of midnight blue dinner jackets but gave up wearing them as I didn't feel fully comfortable. I also like white dinner jackets for the summer but I haven't had one since I was at university (it was single-breasted, cream ribbed silk, with a shawl collar.)

 

[iammatt]

See, to get a dinner jacket made, I'd ask if they had some really blacker than black blacks (or midnight) in wool fresco and see how I liked it.

Fresco is not really appropriate for a tuxedo or whatever else you might want to call it. The best material is probably wool and mohair followed by pure wool. Fresco is not a dressy enough fabric.

 

[dhermann1]

My old tux

I have an old tux which, I'm sorry to say, no longer fits. It didn't get narrower, I got wider. It's also pretty worn. That's it in my avatar. I got it in a second hand store on the Lower East Side in about 1987 for just a few bucks. It's made of horse blanket heavy wool, with all sorts of nice hand stitched touches. It's 4x2 double breasted, with WIDE peaked lapels covered with grosgrain. It has a nice tuck at the waist, and a little padding in the shoulders. In other words, it's totallly 40's. I used to wear it frequently when I MC-ed dances at NY Swing Dance Society. I'd slick back my hair, get a red carnation in my lapel, a silk hanky in my pocket, and I felt like a cross between Cary Grant and George Raft. Gotta find another just like it some day.

 

[cookie]

White Tie and the White House - The Queen and W

An article on White Tie from the UK Spectator regarding the Queen's recent vist to Washington.

A banquet for the Queen
Alexander Chancellor

Before last Monday’s state banquet for the Queen in Washington, it was being put about that President Bush didn’t want it to be a white-tie affair. ‘We sort of had to convince him a little bit,’ the First Lady, Laura Bush, said on ABC Television. And his supposed abhorrence of formality was implicitly confirmed by the White House social secretary, Amy Zantzinger, who, when asked about it, told the New York Times: ‘I think Mrs Bush is thrilled to have a white-tie dinner, and we’ll leave it at that.’

The White House’s idea was to suggest that the homespun, cowboy-booted, God-fearing Texan rancher had no time for the effete and elitist sartorial customs of the British; and the New York Times went along with this spin by representing the banquet as a ‘collision of cultures — Texas swagger meets British prim’.

But that is rubbish. The fact is that you are much more likely to find an American in a white tie than you are an Englishman. Whereas our next prime minister, Gordon Brown, has even refused to put on a white tie for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, George Bush is perfectly happy to wear one when the occasion demands it — as he did at the banquet given for him by the Queen in Buckingham Palace in 2003.

The Americans may have invented jeans and T-shirts, and have adopted sportswear as their national dress, but they have never stopped loving formal occasions. You can’t be a middle-class American without being regularly called on to wear a dinner jacket, and there are times in Washington DC when the streets seem to be thronged with young men in black ties making their way to some event or other.

In the United States, formality grows as you go south. The South’s most exclusive social event is the Swan Ball in Nashville, Tennessee, to which I was once invited, ten years ago. The price of attendance then was $500, the theme was ‘elegance’, and the dress was white tie and tails. President Bush claims to be a Southerner, and he must have attended a few events like that.

It is nevertheless true that white-tie dinners at the White House are rare. The banquet for the Queen was only the third for a visiting head of state since 1980. The others were for the Emperor of Japan in 1994 and for the King of Spain in 2000, both given by President Clinton.


But this doesn’t mean that the White House is resistant to the ultimate in formal dress; it’s just choosy about whom it dons it for. And, curiously, it seems only to do it either for itself on special days, like the Millennium Eve, or for visiting royalty.

When the Queen last visited Washington in 1991, the president was George W.’s father, George H.W. Bush, who also gave her a state banquet but not in white tie. Perhaps he felt that Britain hadn’t been loyal enough to deserve the honour, for Mrs Thatcher had actually chided him in public for going ‘wobbly’ over Iraq. By contrast, Tony Blair’s support for his son has been exemplary.

This was the Queen’s third encounter with George Junior. Her first was at lunch during her 1991 visit to Washington when the circumstances were bizarre. His mother, Barbara Bush, recounted in her memoirs that she had jokingly told the Queen during the lunch that she had put her ‘Texas son as far away from her as possible at the table and told him that he was not allowed to say a word to her’.

According to the former First Lady’s account, the Queen then turned to George W. and asked him why this was. Was he ‘the black sheep in the family’? she wondered. Dubya replied that he guessed that he was, and then asked the Queen who was the black sheep in her family.

He could, perhaps, have been more tactful; since, on the eve of her ‘annus horribilis’, the Queen then had a small flock of contenders for the role. But this was an example of Bush Junior’s would-be lovable little-boy cheek, a trait that he demonstrated again this week when, after getting the date of the Queen’s 1976 bicentennial visit to America wrong by 200 years, he winked at her and confided to the 7,000 people on the White House lawn that she had given him ‘a look that only a mother could give a child’.

There has never been much squeamishness in America about the white tie as such. Ronald Reagan positively loved it and insisted it be worn at his inaugural balls in 1981 (he wore morning dress for the inauguration itself). And remember Fred Astaire’s ringing endorsement of the outfit in his song from the 1935 film Top Hat:

I just got an invitation through the mails,
‘Your presence requested this evening, it’s formal —
A top hat, a white tie, and tails.’
Nothing now could take the wind out of my sails
Because I’m invited to step out this evening
With top hat and white tie and tails.


But when they are dealing with the British, Americans become confused in their attitude to formal dress. It doesn’t matter how informal we Britons have actually become, or how much more reluctant we are than they to tog ourselves out like penguins. We are irrevocably stamped on the American mind as stiff, snooty and elitist. And for them to wear white tie in our presence associates them with these contemptible characteristics of ours.

When it comes to the monarchy, Americans are even more confused. ‘Let’s face it, all Americans are a bit intrigued by royalty,’ said Laura Bush’s spokeswoman, Sally McDonough, this week. And this understatement was born out by their strenuous efforts to impress their royal visitors with their mastery of pomp and pageantry.


But at the same time many Americans feel uncomfortable with the thought that they might be showing deference to the institution that oppressed their forebears and shed their blood in the revolutionary war. They don’t like the idea that they have shaken off the British yoke only to grovel before George III’s descendant.

So while this week Americans wanted to give a warm and lavish welcome to the head of state of their closest ally, some were in a quandary as to how much bowing and curtseying and dressing up to do. Perhaps President George W. Bush was among them.

But, as far as I know, only one American went so far as to refuse an invitation to the royal banquet. He was Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada who, according to his spokesman, ‘isn’t much of a white-tail-at-dinner kind of a guy and would just as soon spend a nice quiet dinner with his wife’.

 

[nycdapper]

Such marvelous replies. It is a pleasure to be in the company of individuals so well-versed in their eveningwear vocabulary!

 

[Undertow]

Wow, I really enjoyed that article. Thank you!

 

[Jovan]

A majority leader refused it? I'm certain it wouldn't have taken THAT huge a dent in his paycheck to get out of the ol' politician's staple of blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. Formal dinners aren't nearly as stuffy as some make them out to be, as well.

 

[cookie]

Will I get invited next time or am I too louche for Boosh?

BK will like this new purchase - a 1940s Palm Beach number.

 

[Jovan]

That certainly qualifies as... off white! I'm not sure what to make of the khaki colour.

EDIT: I have to ask, why do eBay sellers never press anything? It would sell something better, for sure.

 

[Anthony Jordan]

BK will like this new purchase - a 1940s Palm Beach number.

Colour looks good to me (and Apparel Arts/Esquire showed se even darker numbers in the 1930s, such as their "Burma" shade, which was approaching tan.) I also like the fact that it has a buttonhole in the lapel.

On pressing, I suspect that for a lot of sellers it is a question of trade-off between the time spent "doing up" an item (pressing, repairing and the like) and the amount extra they are likely to get as a result of doing so. Plus, with a jacket like that, I'd be very reluctant to press it unless it was pristine - and cleaning adds further expense to be recouped in the FSP. Just my thoughts.

 

[Jovan]

I'm not talking about professional pressing, just at home. That's hardly an "expense."

 

[Anthony Jordan]

I actually had two points in mind, only the second of which concerned expense. My first thought was simply that home pressing takes time and that people who choose not to do so simply find that they have better uses for that time.

My second point, about expense, was prompted by the specific consideration that I would never try and press a light coloured jacket like that unless it was absolutely clean for fear of setting in any stain and that, for me, would suggest sending out to a professional cleaner (for the same reason) - hence the expense.

 

[cookie]

My New PB Jacket

I actually had two points in mind, only the second of which concerned expense. My first thought was simply that home pressing takes time and that people who choose not to do so simply find that they have better uses for that time.


My second point, about expense, was prompted by the specific consideration that I would never try and press a light coloured jacket like that unless it was absolutely clean for fear of setting in any stain and that, for me, would suggest sending out to a professional cleaner (for the same reason) - hence the expense.

Thanks for the suggestion.The experts hereabouts have suggested that traditionally PB can even be washed. The instructions also say so on the garment. I think I will start with dry clenaing but am considering maybe a modern oxygen style bleaching if it is too dark.