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musings on men's formal wear from the creator of The Black Tie Guide
Browsing All Posts filed under »Classic Black Tie«
Gatsby-Esque
Well, the long-delayed release of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is almost here and Brooks Brothers is taking full advantage of the film’s lush portrayal of Jazz Age glamour. The latest “lookbook” from the esteemed haberdashers explains: From the designs of double-Academy Award-winning designer Catherine Martin, Brooks Brothers produced all the men’s costumes in Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation […]
Black Tie vs. Tuxedo: The Great Divide
April 15, 2013
The recent season finale of The New Normal was very astute in its understanding of black tie in today’s world. At the wedding of the two lead characters, the affluent and urbane grooms wore turndown collars with self-tie bow ties and well-fitting tuxedos. Meanwhile, a small-town simpleton guest wore a undersized wing collar and pre-tied […]
Review: British GQ’s “A Black-tie Invitation from Henry Poole”
November 1, 2012
British GQ’s latest guide to Black Tie couldn’t be more English, drawing as it does on the sage advice of Henry Poole tailors. It is Savile Row through and through, including the preference for grosgrain lapels over satin, waistcoats over cummerbunds, marcella shirts over pleated and turndown collars over wing. At times like this I […]
The Tartan Dinner Jacket
June 21, 2012
Tartan dinner jackets hit the spotlight in 1949 when Tailor and Cutter, the bible of London’s menswear industry, blasted Americans for starting the “deplorable” fad. “Not even Scots would dare to follow this trend” it proclaimed. Imagine the editors’ mortification when it was reported the following year that King George VI owned two of the […]
Seamless Shoes and Silk Laces
June 15, 2012
In the fall of 1934 menswear trade journal Apparel Arts featured a novel innovation in evening footwear: The increased popularity of the tailcoat and opera hat have been recent indications of the return to formal sartorial perfection. In making these concessions to true formality, however, we have found the standards of today on an even […]
Vintage Warm-Weather Black Tie
May 18, 2012
After writing all week I have finally finished a new page dedicated to Vintage Warm-Weather Black Tie just in time for the start of the summer season in Canada and the US. Some of the more interesting tidbits I (re)discovered during the process: full-dress summer events had disappeared from the US by the 1920s and […]
My White Dinner Jacket: Take II
May 6, 2012
Well it took quite a while but I finally got my Jos. A. Bank white dinner jacket back from the tailors. As I mentioned in a previous post, it fitted so poorly that it had to be completely taken apart and reconstructed. The shoulders are now more natural, the waist is tapered, the sleeves have […]
Capes & Canes: What Would Don Draper Do?
March 25, 2012
When readers ask me if it’s okay to embellish their tuxedo with a cape, cane, top hat and/or gloves it’s immediately apparent that they have not yet grasped the true essence of black tie. This is quite understandable considering that the typical man’s wardrobe today is so casual that a formal wardrobe can appear entirely […]
Flashback: Vintage Waistcoats
March 23, 2012
I’ve just added an extensive review of the history of evening waistcoats to the Vintage section of The Black Tie Guide. As I poured over visuals spanning two centuries I was most struck by the tremendous diversity of waistcoats offered in the 1930s, the golden age of formal wear. In today’s world where distressed jeans […]
Formal Motifs in The Artist
March 4, 2012
(Spoiler Alert!) I finally got around to seeing The Artist this weekend and enjoyed it thoroughly both as a classic film buff and as modern movie-goer who’s grown weary of roller-coaster camera moves, rapid-fire edits, and computer-generated artificiality. As anyone who’s seen it knows, formal wear is very prevalent in the film as befitting a […]
May 1, 2013
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