The white dinner jacket. When to wear it, what to wear it with, and why it is never pure white

I am at the cutting table on Avenida da Liberdade 110, escritorio 209, Lisbon, with a bolt of ivory wool-silk blend unrolled across the surface. A client wants a white dinner jacket for a July wedding in the Algarve. He keeps calling it a white tuxedo. I keep calling it an ivory dinner jacket. He asks what the difference is. I tell him the difference is ninety years of tradition and the entire reason the garment exists. He sits down. What follows is that conversation, written down.

The white dinner jacket was born in 1931 at Palm Beach and Cannes

The white dinner jacket appeared in the same resort season, and in the same pages, as the mess jacket. In May 1931, the American trade publication Men’s Wear printed what may be the first depiction of a light-coloured summer evening jacket. Five months later, the same magazine showed single- and double-breasted peak lapel versions of a white dinner jacket and described them as “as seen at Cannes.” In October 1931, Men’s Wear reported on a white shawl-collar dinner jacket worn to a costume ball on Long Island and wrote that “these white evening jackets are growing in popularity among wealthy men at summer resorts.” Palm Beach and Cannes were the two places where the garment established itself. Both were warm-weather resorts where the standard dark dinner suit was unbearable after sunset, and where the social code was relaxed enough to allow a lighter jacket with dark trousers.

Though not as well established as the mess jacket, it is rapidly gaining acceptance.

Men’s Wear, summer 1933

By August 1936, Esquire had laid down the warm weather black tie canon: a single- or double-breasted light jacket with self-faced lapels, black tropical-weight trousers, patent oxfords, a soft white shirt, and a black bow tie.

The mess jacket was dead within five years. Hotel corridors and jazz bands adopted it, and men of taste abandoned it. The white dinner jacket survived because it read as an evening garment rather than a costume.

Why the ivory dinner jacket is never pure white

Everyone calls it a white dinner jacket. The colour has always been ivory, cream, or off-white. Two reasons, one practical and one social.

The practical reason is that natural fibres, particularly wool, contain oils that resist bleaching. You cannot take wool to a pure optic white without degrading the fibre. The lightest wool-silk blends settle at a soft ivory, and that is the colour the cloth has been producing since the 1930s. Sean Connery’s jacket in Goldfinger was ivory. Casablanca was shot in black and white, and the costume references that describe Bogart’s jacket call it ivory rather than optic white.

The social reason is that pure white was the colour of military mess dress and of the jackets worn by waiters and bartenders. A man in a bleached white dinner jacket at a resort looked like staff. Ivory gave enough contrast with the white dress shirt to read as a guest, as a person of authority.

Why a white dinner jacket has self-faced lapels with no silk

A black dinner jacket uses silk or satin facings on the lapels to distinguish it from a suit jacket. The ivory dinner jacket is already so different in colour from any suit that the silk facing serves no purpose. It also introduces a black element to a jacket whose whole point is the absence of black above the waist. The lapels are cut from the same cloth as the body of the jacket, with no silk laid over them. This is the tradition, and it is the detail that separates a correct dinner jacket from a rental costume. If you see an off-the-rack white jacket with black satin lapels, it is historically wrong.

What to wear with a white dinner jacket

Black. Nine times out of ten, black. Midnight blue is acceptable. The trousers should be the same formal trousers you would wear with a black dinner jacket: a silk braid or stripe down the outseam, a natural waist, a plain hem. White trousers with a white dinner jacket belong in the tropics, and even there, most men chose black. The contrast between the light jacket and the dark trousers gives the outfit its structure. Match the trousers to the jacket and you look like a waiter, or like a man wearing a cream suit to a black-tie event.

Bogart wore the ivory dinner jacket in Casablanca in 1942

Humphrey Bogart wore an ivory double-breasted dinner jacket in Casablanca, released on November 26, 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz. The jacket had a wide self-faced shawl collar with belly, a 4-on-1 button front, straight jetted hip pockets, a welted breast pocket, no vents, and white plastic sew-through buttons. He wore it with black formal trousers with a black satin side stripe, a white dress shirt with a long-pointed turndown collar, a black silk bow tie, and black patent cap-toe oxfords. The film is set in early December 1941 in Casablanca, Morocco, a Mediterranean climate where the ivory dinner jacket is appropriate year-round. The jacket was the correct garment for the place and the season, and the wardrobe department knew it.

Bogart’s jacket is the single most copied dinner jacket in cinema. Every tailor who has made one in the last eighty years has been asked to reproduce it at least once.

The ivory dinner jacket James Bond made his own in 1964

Sean Connery wore an ivory dinner jacket in the pre-title sequence of Goldfinger, released in 1964. The jacket was made by Anthony Sinclair, Connery’s tailor throughout his Bond tenure. It was single-breasted with peak lapels, self-faced, one mother-of-pearl button at the waist, four matching buttons at each cuff, jetted pockets, and no vents. He wore it with black trousers, a black bow tie, and a red carnation in the buttonhole. The trousers lacked the traditional silk side stripe, which Bond Suits records as an oversight rather than a decision.

The Goldfinger jacket established the peak lapel as an alternative to the shawl collar for ivory dinner jackets. Before 1964, the shawl collar was the dominant style. After Goldfinger, the peak lapel became the usual cut for Bond’s ivory dinner jackets. The garment has been a warm weather black tie standard ever since.

The real wartime story behind the white dinner jacket wetsuit scene

The most famous scene in Goldfinger is the moment when Bond emerges from the sea in a wetsuit, strips it off, and reveals a pressed dinner jacket underneath. That scene has a real origin.

On November 23, 1941, a Dutch agent named Pieter Tazelaar was put ashore at Scheveningen, the seaside town near The Hague, wearing a specially designed rubber oversuit to keep him dry during the landing. Under the oversuit he wore full evening dress. The operation was called Contact Holland. It was organised by the Dutch government in exile and the British Secret Intelligence Service. Tazelaar’s colleague Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema sprinkled a few drops of Hennessy XO brandy on him so he could pass the German sentries near the seafront casino as a drunk reveller returning from a night out.

Put ashore at 4.35 am on November 23 at Scheveningen near the seafront casino in full evening dress and smelling of alcohol.

Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 2010

The detail comes from MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service by Professor Keith Jeffery, the first official history of SIS, published in 2010. Jeffery had unrestricted access to the MI6 files.

Tazelaar’s mission was to establish radio contact with England and to arrange the extraction of two resistance figures. The radio was damaged in its parachute drop. The extraction failed when sea conditions made the pickup impossible. Tazelaar fled the Netherlands at the end of January 1942, travelling through France, Spain, and Portugal before reaching England in April. He returned to occupied Holland in November 1944, parachuted into Friesland, and maintained radio contact with London until the end of the war.

When to wear a white dinner jacket and when not to

The ivory dinner jacket belongs in warm weather and in warm climates. The traditional rule, as stated in etiquette guides from the 1930s onward, is that it is appropriate at formal occasions in the tropics year-round, and in the United States during the summer season, typically at open-air events such as country club dances and yacht club parties. In the United Kingdom, twentieth-century etiquette held that white dinner jackets were never worn, even on the hottest day of summer. They were reserved for wear abroad.

The most thorough online reference for the garment, the Bond Suits website, summarises the consensus: the ivory dinner jacket should never be worn in the British Isles, never in large cities, and only in warm weather.

White dinner jacket etiquette for a northern city in winter

My position is no. If you live in London, Paris, or Berlin and it is December, wear a black or midnight blue dinner jacket. The ivory dinner jacket was created for a specific problem: a dark wool jacket is unbearable in tropical and subtropical heat. If there is no heat, there is no problem to solve, and the garment becomes an affectation. I have turned down clients who wanted an ivory dinner jacket for a December wedding in northern Europe. I have made them for clients in Lisbon, because Lisbon in July is thirty-five degrees and the garment makes sense.

Context is everything.

White dinner jacket vs tuxedo: what is the actual difference

A tuxedo and a dinner jacket are the same garment. Americans say tuxedo, the British say dinner jacket, and the Italians say smoking. The white tuxedo is properly called an ivory dinner jacket. The difference that matters is between a black dinner jacket and an ivory one. A black dinner jacket has silk or satin facings on the lapels. An ivory dinner jacket has self-faced lapels cut from the same cloth as the body, with no silk. A black dinner jacket is worn in any season. An ivory dinner jacket is worn in warm weather and warm climates only. If you call it a white tuxedo, no tailor will correct you. If you order one with black satin lapels, a good tailor will.

How a bespoke Lisbon atelier cuts the white dinner jacket

A made-to-measure ivory dinner jacket at ATELIER 23 takes four to six weeks from the first consultation to delivery. The process begins with cloth selection at our atelier at Avenida da Liberdade 110, escritorio 209, Lisbon. We source our cloth from Italian factories, and for an ivory dinner jacket I recommend a wool-silk blend light enough for warm weather and heavy enough to hold a clean drape through a long evening. Linen is an option for extreme heat, but it creases, and a creased dinner jacket is a failed dinner jacket.

The jacket is cut by our tailors in Serra da Estrela, in the mountains of central Portugal, who have trained in the Italian tradition. There is one fitting at roughly the four-week mark, at which we check the shoulder line, the balance, the buttoning point, and the sleeve length. The jacket is then finished and delivered.

If you are the groom, the wedding guide covers the rest of the outfit: the shirt, the shoes, and what the rest of the party should wear.

White dinner jacket questions we get before an order