The New Year's Tuxedo

There’s a famous episode of Seinfeld where Jerry goes out to dinner at a restaurant with a strict dress code and when he shows up without a jacket, he is given one by the staff to wear while he is there. As far as I know this sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. When I went out to dinner for my wedding anniversary this fall, I had on jeans and a cardigan. For a dinner out with friends, I wore a tweed jacket and tie, and at a handful of concerts I wore a bomber jacket or aloha shirt. The only places I know about that require (or at least strongly recommend) a jacket are private clubs, but as recently as the 1960s, eveningwear was strictly prescribed for men.

If you were going out to a nice restaurant (or supper club or performance venue) in the 1950s, you would need a tuxedo. This was not a universal rule, but for the middle class and above these dress codes were commonly understood. As these sharply-defined levels of formality began to go away, the tuxedo went from being something you’d wear every weekend to something you might have around for a very fancy special occasion. The last times I can remember wearing a tuxedo or dinner jacket were for weddings or a specifically black-tie birthday party. In a world where men are often afraid of being over-dressed, and the most formal garment they wear is usually a dark business suit, when are you going to get the chance to wear a tuxedo?

The answer is New Year's Eve. Women will be wearing nice dresses that they carefully picked out. Drinks will be flowing. When you arrive at a New Year's party, there will be at least one and probably more than ten people wearing costume top hats or sashes or big plastic glasses with the upcoming year on them. It’s a party, and a party where you’re expected to dress out of the ordinary, to dress up, to be someone different for a few hours. I’m not saying to necessarily go out and buy a tuxedo especially for New Years (unless you’ve really been wanting one in which case yes, I am) but if you already have one languishing in the closet, here are a few reasons for you to break it out this December 31st.

1. A tuxedo is evening wear: By necessity, New Year's parties almost all happen at night. (I say almost all because a bar near me rings in the New Year for the European and Atlantic time zones, so you have the option of toasting Greek or Moroccan New Year's, then getting dinner and being at home in your jammies by 9) The tuxedo was made to be worn at night, so it’s in its natural habitat as the clock ticks towards midnight. Tuxedoes were made for going out and having a good time, and New Year’s Eve is as if “going out and having a good time” were made into a worldwide holiday.

2. Dress codes don’t matter anymore: As I said at the start of this article, dress codes barely exist these days. While this has had the effect of making the tuxedo rarer than it once was, it also grants you the freedom to bring it back whenever you want. The nice thing about the decreasing power of dress codes is that we’re given the opportunity to express ourselves more fully through our clothing. If you want to wear a tuxedo to a restaurant, I promise people will not make fun of you. If they notice you at all, they’re going to assume you’re headed somewhere even fancier after your meal. You can also wear variations on black tie that might have offended earlier dress-code-watchers. Wearing an off-white dinner jacket (a summer garment) for New Year's in the 1950s would get you, at best, a lot of strange looks. Today, people will just think you look cool as hell. You can also bend the rules even further if you want. I’ve seen tuxedoes with cowboy boots and bolo ties, tuxedo pants with dark kimono jackets, and crisp 1930s vintage double-breasted tuxes, and any of these would be great for watching the ball drop with your closest friends.

3. If you’ve got it, flaunt it: If you have a tuxedo in your closet, why not seize on an opportunity to wear it? Clothes are meant to be worn, even formal clothing. Who are you saving that tuxedo for? You bought it so that you could wear it, so wear it! If it gets dirty, that’s part of the story of your life. When you tell your dry cleaner that your dinner jacket got splashed with champagne during a New Year's toast, I promise they won’t think less of you. Quite the opposite, in fact.

4. New Year, new you: New Year's is about the future, about making a new start. A cynic might say that really it’s like any other night of the year, we’re just putting emphasis on it because of a quirk of the calendar. But you could say the same thing about Christmas, or the Fourth of July. There’s nothing inherent about those dates that make them important – it’s what we do with them. On New Year’s Eve, we watch the clock turn over to another year with the people we love because it reminds us that new things are always coming around the bend. We’re looking at three hundred sixty-five more days in which anything can happen. Dressing up in our finest is a reminder that during those days we can look good and feel good, and that’s how I want to greet the new year.

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Eric Langlois

Eric Langlois is a writer, menswear professional, and history enthusiast based on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

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