How the Tuxedo Got Its Name at a Country Club in New York

The tuxedo's naming is most commonly attributed to an evening in October 1886 at the Tuxedo Park Club in Orange County, New York. Griswold Lorillard allegedly appeared wearing a tailless evening jacket instead of the customary tailcoat. The garment scandalised the old guard and delighted the young.

The garment predates its American christening. The dinner jacket evolved from the smoking jacket in the 1880s, when the Prince of Wales commissioned Henry Poole & Co to make a short evening coat for informal Sandringham dinners. Satin-faced lapels distinguished it from a daytime lounge suit.

Henry Poole, still at 15 Savile Row, maintains records suggesting the jacket reached Tuxedo Park through James Brown Potter, an American friend of the Prince. Whether Lorillard or Potter deserves credit, the Savile Row to New York path is documented (https://www.henrypoole.com).

Hollywood accelerated the dinner jacket's conquest. Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, and Sean Connery demonstrated it could be worn with grace and ease the stiffer tailcoat rarely permitted. By the 1920s the tailcoat had retreated to the most formal occasions.

The canonical dinner jacket is midnight blue or black, single-breasted with one button, peaked or shawl lapels in silk. Trousers feature a silk stripe without cuffs. White dress shirt with marcella bib, black bow tie, and patent or polished Oxford shoes complete the ensemble.

Barathea is the traditional cloth, a fine twill with a faintly grained surface that holds its shape and does not flare under a photographer's flash. Midnight blue is not an affectation: black cloth under tungsten light takes on a dusty green cast, while midnight blue reads as a deeper black than black. Facings come in satin, which reflects, or grosgrain, which has a fine rib and reflects less. Choose one and match the bow tie and the trouser braid to it.

Common errors abound. A long tie diminishes formality. Cummerbund and waistcoat together is redundant. Notch lapels lack authority. Brown shoes, coloured shirts, and novelty accessories belong at costume parties, not proper black-tie events.

Dinner-suit trousers are cut for braces, which is why properly made ones carry no belt loops: a belt breaks the line at precisely the point the cummerbund exists to cover. Dry-clean the suit once a season at most, since solvent flattens the finish of the cloth. Between wearings hang it out overnight, brush the shoulders with a natural-bristle clothes brush, and store it in a cotton bag rather than the polythene the cleaner returns it in.

The cost ladder is unusually clear. Hire runs roughly £120 to £200 for a weekend and buys a suit cut for nobody. Off-the-peg from a decent maker starts around £400 and, altered by a tailor for another £80, will beat almost any rental. Made-to-measure sits at £1,200 to £2,500, and Savile Row bespoke several thousand above that. Past the made-to-measure band the improvement is in cloth and handwork rather than in how the thing reads across a dining room.

Every man should own a well-fitted dinner jacket by thirty. Rental tuxedos rarely fit or flatter. A made-to-measure dinner suit, maintained with pressing and stored on a broad hanger, serves for a decade. It is the most cost-effective formal wardrobe investment a man can make.