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Know Everything About Dinner Jackets
The term
tuxedo is itself variously used in different parts of the world. It
always refers to some form of dinner jacket, and sees most use in
North America, where the term originated. There, it is commonly taken
to mean a modern variation on the traditional black tie, while in
Britain, it is sometimes used to refer to the white jacket alternative.
Black tie
dates from 1860, when Henry Poole & Co. (Savile Row's founders),
created a short smoking jacket for the then Prince of Wales (later
Edward VII of the United Kingdom) to wear to informal dinner parties
as an alternative to white tie, the standard formal dress. At that
time, lounge suits were starting to be worn in the country, and the
new dress code was an evening lounge suit intended for use in a
relaxed atmosphere out of town. According to sartorial legend, in the
spring of 1886, because the Prince liked Cora Potter, he invited her
husband, James Potter, a rich New Yorker, to Sandringham House, his
Norfolk hunting estate. When Potter asked the Prince's dinner dress
recommendation, he sent Potter to Henry Poole & Co., in London.
On returning to New York in 1886, Potter's dinner suit proved popular
at the Tuxedo Park Club; the club men copied him, soon making it
their informal dining uniform. The evening dress for men now
popularly known as a tuxedo takes its name from Tuxedo Park, where it
was said to have been worn for the first time in the United States,
by Griswald Lorillard at the annual Autumn Ball of the Tuxedo Club
founded by Pierre Lorillard IV, and thereafter became popular for
formal dress in America. Legend dictates that it became known as the
tuxedo when a fellow asked another at the Autumn Ball, "Why does
that man's jacket not have coattails on it?" The other answered,
"He is from Tuxedo Park." The first gentleman
misinterpreted and told all of his friends that he saw a man wearing
a jacket without coattails called a tuxedo, not from Tuxedo.
While the
Americans initially called the new garment a tuxedo, the term has
since been inaccurately used, particularly in America, to denote any
form of formal or semi-formal dress including white tie, morning
dress, and strollers. Two years later, it gained the name dinner
jacket in Britain, a name it has also kept in the North-Eastern U.S. |
