Have you worn a tuxedo?

TUXEDO — A tuxedo or dinner suit/dinner jacket is a semi-formal suit distinguished primarily by satin or grosgrain facings on the jacket’s lapels and buttons and a similar stripe along the outseam of the trousers. The suit is typically black and commonly worn with a formal shirt, shoes and other accessories, most traditionally in the form prescribed by the black tie dress code. The tuxedo’s history dates from 1860, when Henry Poole & Co. (Savile Row’s founders), created a short smoking jacket for the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII, to wear to informal dinner parties. In the summer of 1886 the prince invited New York millionaire James Potter to his Norfolk hunting estate. When Potter asked for a dinner dress recommendation, he sent Potter to his tailors, Henry Poole & Co., in London, to obtain the new style of jacket. Potter then brought the dinner suit home with him to Tuxedo Park Club, a newly established residential country club for New York’s elite. The dinner suit proved popular; the club men copied him, soon making it their informal dining uniform. According to second-hand sources dating back to the 1930s, the coat style was then adopted by New York society when Griswold Lorillard, son of one of the Tuxedo Park founders, wore it to the wealthy enclave’s 1886 Autumn Ball. Other accounts say the jacket’s American debut is one provided by Grenville Kane, one of the original founders of Tuxedo Park. His explanation is that the club’s members began to wear the jacket in public when they would dine in public in New York City and that curious onlookers came to associate the jacket with the club’s name. Following World War II the tuxedo began to take on traits that deviated from the strict black-and-white interpretation maintained by the black tie dress code. Color, texture and pattern became increasingly popular in warm-weather jackets to the point where Americans associated the term dinner jacket solely with these separates rather than as a general synonym for tuxedo. Beginning in the 1980s tuxedo jackets increasingly took on traits of the business suit such as two- and three-button styling, flap pockets and center vents. Most notably, the notch lapel had become the most common lapel style by the turn of the millennium. The most popular uses of the tuxedo in North America are for weddings, proms and formal nights on cruises and even for formal fund-raising events. Source: Compilations from wikipedia.org