The dinner jacket. Bought once in a lifetime

In the first week of September we put the season's first dinner jacket into work. Black wool, peak lapel, trousers on side adjusters instead of a belt. The client arrived with an invitation for December that carried, in small type in the corner, the words black tie, and with the honest question of what exactly that meant. I understand him. A made to measure tuxedo happens to most men once every few years, and every time it feels like the first. We have cut hundreds of suits in twelve years and far fewer dinner jackets, and here is the curious part: the dinner jackets are the ones everybody remembers.

The reason is simple. In a suit you work. In a dinner jacket you celebrate, surrounded by people who also have nothing to prove that evening. It appears at a wedding and at a New Year dinner, which is to say on exactly the evenings that end up in the family album. So we cut it from cloths that have a biography of their own: Scabal dressed Bond in GoldenEye in 1995, and the velvet for Daniel Craig's jacket at the No Time to Die premiere in 2021 came off the same looms. A dinner jacket like that is bought once and worn for twenty years.

How a smoking jacket outlived smoking

In 1865 the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, ordered a short evening coat from Henry Poole on Savile Row to replace the tailcoat. It was meant for after dinner at Sandringham, in the smoking room, so that the tailcoat would not carry the smell of cigars. Hence the word used across continental Europe: le smoking. The English themselves say dinner jacket, and wince slightly at smoking.

It reached America in 1886. The New York millionaire James Potter stayed with the prince, had one made at the same house, and brought it to the Tuxedo Park country club north of the city. The rest is legend: at the club's autumn ball the young Griswold Lorillard appeared in a coat with no tails, the local paper wrote that he belonged in a straitjacket, and a year later the whole club dressed that way. Tuxedo stuck in America, dinner jacket in London. The garment is the same; only the name is argued over.

Since then it has outlived Edward, the smoking rooms, Prohibition, two wars, disco, the Bond wardrobes, the wedding showrooms of the nineties and even the photo shoots with three-day stubble. Of all the evening garments of the nineteenth century, it is the only one that arrived here intact.

Why the dinner jacket did not die

The same rule applies as with the overcoat. The fewer formal garments remain in a wardrobe, the more weight falls on the one that is left. When men wore a suit every day, the dinner jacket was simply another suit, slightly darker. Now that the office has released the tie and then the jacket, it is the last place where evening still differs from day. An invitation marked black tie has become a rare sort of gift: at least once a year one can dress properly.

Why did the Duke of Windsor order his dinner jackets in midnight blue in the thirties. Why did Marlene Dietrich walk into Morocco in 1930 in white tie and a top hat, and the room accepted it. Why did Yves Saint Laurent, in 1966, call the women's trouser suit le smoking. Because from the first day the dinner jacket broke one rule in order to keep all the others. Under electric light navy reads blacker than black; Dietrich in tails looked more feminine than any gown; and Saint Laurent borrowed from men the most masculine thing they had.

I cannot agree with those who say the dinner jacket is finished. Look at the carpet at any large ceremony over the past five years: there are fewer costumes every season. Young actors turn up looking the way their grandfathers looked, and that is the most accurate verdict a garment can be given.

The dinner jacket was invented so that a man could smoke after dinner. Smoking stopped being compulsory long ago.ATELIER 23

What a dinner jacket is made of

It begins with cloth, and here the choice is shorter than for a suit, and stricter. The classic is barathea, a dense wool with a fine grained weave that barely shines and holds a lapel well. We cut it in Vitale Barberis Canonico Super 130's, from a mill that has worked in Biella since 1663, and in mohair and wool from Dormeuil, the Paris house of 1842. Mohair is angora goat: a hard fibre with a dry, restrained lustre, and it has the two virtues Hollywood loved it for in the fifties. It holds its shape until morning and it does not crease in a car, which in a country where half an hour of road separates the church from the estate is not a small detail.

Colour. Black is compulsory if you own only one. Midnight blue I recommend to a man who already has black, or who is photographed a great deal: under a flash, black wool goes grey, while midnight blue stays deep. The Duke of Windsor noticed exactly this ninety years ago. The ivory dinner jacket we cut for summer and for the south, which in Portugal means most of the wedding season: an estate in the Alentejo in July, dinner on a boat, the Algarve in August, Madeira at the turn of the year.

Velvet is its own case. The midnight velvet jacket in Scabal cloth with a satin shawl collar is in the atelier now, and it is worn where full black tie would be too serious: at home, at closed dinners, on New Year's Eve among friends.

The decisions you make at the atelier

Commissioning a dinner jacket is not choosing between models in a window. It is answering four questions, and none of them has one right answer for everybody.

Peak or shawl. A peak lapel lifts the shoulder and lengthens a man who is short or broad. A shawl rounds and softens, and it is the natural choice for an angular face and for velvet. We try both at the mirror before deciding, because the difference reads in two seconds and explains badly in words.

Satin or grosgrain. Smooth satin reflects light and is what a photograph expects. Ribbed grosgrain absorbs it and ages better: it scuffs less and does not develop shine where the jacket rubs. A man who wears his dinner jacket twice a year usually prefers satin; a man who wears it ten times prefers grosgrain.

One button, double-breasted or waistcoat. The single-breasted one-button is the reference and suits almost everyone. Double-breasted gives a waist to a man who has none and needs no cummerbund. A waistcoat solves the waistband for a man who wants neither, and it is the quietest of the three.

Side adjusters or braces. Side adjusters keep the trousers in place with nothing under the jacket. Braces let them hang straight and are better for a man who spends three hours seated at dinner. You do not wear both.

Those are the choices. What the code requires, and does not leave to you, is gathered in the twenty-one rules of black tie.

Dinner jacket or dark suit

The question I hear most. If the invitation says black tie, there is one answer and it is the dinner jacket; a dark suit with a black tie that evening reads as an apology. If it says cocktail, or says nothing at all, a navy suit with a white shirt and no tie sits better than a dinner jacket, because being overdressed is worse than being underdressed. An evening wedding, a significant birthday in a restaurant, a company dinner in a good room, an awards evening, a charity gala: all dinner jacket. A company party in a warehouse with a DJ: a suit, or better still a cashmere sweater.

There is one more rule that everybody forgets: a dinner jacket goes on after six in the evening. At four in the afternoon, at a daytime wedding, it looks like a mistake of code however well it is cut. Which is why at a summer wedding the groom wears a three-piece suit for the ceremony and changes into black tie only for dinner.

How a made to measure dinner jacket is made

The first conversation takes about an hour. We look at cloth in the length, because barathea and mohair have to be handled, take measurements, and talk about where and among whom the jacket will be worn: the lapel for a wedding and the lapel for a gala need not be the same. We match the lapel silk to the cloth, then the buttons, then the lining. The buttons, incidentally, are the longest stage: men choose buttons for longer than they choose cloth.

The length then goes to our own workshop in the Serra da Estrela, where our suits and coats are made. The first fitting comes a few weeks later and settles the shoulder, the sleeve and the trouser. The finished jacket follows. The whole route takes four to six weeks, and here I am pedantic again: a dinner jacket for the turn of the year is ordered in October. Order at the end of November and it arrives in January, and January is precisely the month when a dinner jacket is least needed.

If the date is close, there are finished dinner jackets at the atelier: black with a peak lapel, ivory with a shawl collar, and midnight velvet. Alterations to the figure are included and take one to two weeks. There is no point comparing this with rental: a rented dinner jacket fits everyone the same way, which is to say it fits nobody.

A dinner jacket for twenty years

It ages more slowly than anything else in a wardrobe, because fashion barely reaches it. Lapel width and trouser line move a centimetre in ten years; the rest has stood still since 1886. The first dinner jacket in our order book is dated November 2018, Scabal cloth, and if it were brought in today there would be nothing to change. One clean a season, a wide hanger, a cloth cover, and every five years we renew the lining.

A good dinner jacket is bought once.

The evening cloths are already in the atelier: barathea in black and midnight blue, mohair and wool. Each length runs to a handful of jackets and the next ones arrive in spring. It is September, and the wedding season returns in May.

Questions before ordering

In the atelier now: Black Tuxedo · Ivory Shawl Tuxedo · Velvet Tuxedo