A tux is for life, not just for Christmas

Senior features writer

Saturday 8 December 2012

'I like the tuxedo, it's a uniform," says Jonny Johansson, founder and creative director of hipper-than-hip Swedish fashion label Acne.

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Barry Didcock

"Let's think of it as a classic 'little black dress' for men." Johansson and Acne have good reason to be talking up the tux, or dinner jacket as we Brits call it: they recently launched a "capsule" collection consisting of 12 pieces of classic evening wear just in time for the Christmas party season.

Among the goodies are a double-breasted velvet jacket in a boozy festive colour (somewhere between a merlot and a Pernod and blackcurrant) and a single-breasted jacket in midnight blue with black satin facings on the lapel and collar.There's also a bow tie, a cummerbund, a white shirt and, because the Swedes are oh-so-casual when it comes to dressing up, a T-shirt. The wine-coloured blazer will set you back £470 from online retailer Mr Porter, Acne's collaborator in the project. The scoop-neck T-shirt is a mere £70.It isn't just Acne who are looking to put the tuxedo back at the heart of men's evening wear, though. At the other end of the price scale, Topman is offering the full three-piece dinner suit for £300 and single-breasted tuxedo blazers in metallic jaquard for £90. Other high-street retailers like Next and River Island are doing the same with their own take on the tux. Suddenly a night out in a suit and tie is starting to look like the scruffy option.As for the nomenclature, don't get too hung up on the differences between tuxedo and DJ. They're pretty much interchangeable, though if you want to impress your friends you can trot out this fact: the tuxedo is so called because it was in the Tuxedo Club, an upmarket country club in New York State, that the jacket was first popularised by American millionaire James Potter in the late 19th century. He in turn picked it up from his friend Albert, the future Edward VII.Sure, it's expensive stuff on the whole but remember this: a tux is for life, not just for Christmas, and a dinner jacket and accoutrements is the kind of "classic piece" most men are expected to either have in their wardrobe or at the end of a begging phone call to a pal who works as a maitre d'. They're also useful for James Bond-themed fancy dress parties, if you're not going as Britt Ekland in The Man With The Golden Gun.Of course many Scots will prefer to wear a kilt to a formal function or party rather than a dinner jacket or a tie-dye bikini, which is fair enough. But while the kilt has many virtues, the ability to make its wearer look louche and devil-may-care is not one of them. Walk into a room full of men wearing kilts and you're either at a ceilidh, a wedding or the post-speech finger buffet and tombola at the annual SNP conference. Walk into a room full of men in tuxedos and you could be at one of Mr Berlusconi's famous cocktail parties. It's an altogether different vibe, I'm sure you'll agree.

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A tux is for life, not just for Christmas

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