Summer's white dinner jacket is, like formal day wear, another of those rarely worn things whose place in the closet can be hard to justify. Good as it looks when it can be trotted out, the thing just does not have many opportunities unless one is some kind of hospitality director for a cruise ship. But, also like the stroller of yesterday's post, having one to wear is a great deal easier if it can do double duty. And, with credit to Luciano Barbera from whom I stole the idea, I have but two words for you dear reader: linen and suit.
The classic white or cream dinner jacket has a shawl lapel, but there is nothing that says a peak is not equally appropriate. And since those lapels are rarely if ever silk (the late paragon A. J. Drexel Biddle had two jackets in cream gabardine and both sets of lapels were self-faced), a conventional double breasted jacket can do double duty. Which leads me inexorably to the cream linen suit, a garment that has only somewhat more utility than the cream or white dinner jacket to anyone who is not spending his summer on the Amalfi coast. But pair the jacket with black semi-formal trousers as Ms. Fran Liebowitz has done in the photograph and it more than suffices for summer evenings. No-one but one's closest friends need know the difference.
Photo: Jonathan Becker
Posts
2 comments:
Why not indeed! the tropical DJ even appeared, for a brief period in the 1920s, as a mess jacket or Spencer and then it did have 'peaked' or DB lapels. A friend of ours is just commissioning a shawl-lapelled, cream, barathea DJ with corded silk facings, from a SR house, for his visit to us in July (when it can get quite chilly). He harbours some odd notion that we will accompany him up the cable car to the top of the Sugar Loaf, when he is wearing this, for a photo opportunity! Some hope!
This double-duty post does not have the same appeal to me as the previous one does. The white or off-white dinner jacket is such a unique item that "accept no substitutes" seems like the only policy to me. It is a unique item of casual semi-formal wear that means one has a variety of acceptable substitutes. To me, any immidation will be a worse compromise than wearing an item with its own style.
Post a Comment