Drake's Diary

Formalwear

As we’re getting into the holiday season, we thought we’d say a few words about formalwear, specifically the dinner jacket. The dinner jacket and its attendant accessories are the most restrained and prescribed attire usually found in a gentleman’s wardrobe (not counting formal academic attire and other uniforms, you understand).

As occasional evening dress of a celebratory or festive nature, it’s traditionally seen as a foil to the more colourful dress worn by the ladies. This observation may of course no longer be in keeping with political correctness, but in practice is still rigorously maintained. It’s interesting that the words prescription and propriety are not as often found in our vocabularies as they used to be. Prescription in dress has become increasingly fragmented into smaller communities within society, and the numerous experiments with social choice in dress – casual formal, alternative formal, neo-trad, whatever you choose to call it – but so many of these remplacants seem so self-conscious, studied, and forced, we prefer the tried and true. After all, the whole point is to seem natural and at ease in our clothes, isn’t it?

And in that regard, let me recount a pertinent anecdote from Cole Lesley’s marvelous The Life of Noel Coward. After Coward’s great success with his first play The Vortex , he was invited to join the prestigious Tomorrow Club, a group that included all the great writers of the day: Compton Mackenzie, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and on and on. But let Lesley tell the story:

            Not knowing the form, Noel arrived at his first meeting with the Tomorrow Club in evening dress, to find everybody in day clothes. He paused only a moment in the doorway as the eminent heads turned towards him. “Now, I don’t want anybody to feel embarrassed,” he said.

And that’s the way to wear formal attire.