The History of the Tuxedo

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Looking back at the history of black tie apparel in the 20th century, few moments stand out above and beyond the rest. But for elegance and understatement—nothing beats a tuxedo, arguably the ultimate in classic formal apparel. Think James Bond: It’s hard to imagine 007 without his signature three-piece suit. Or Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and Fred Astaire in just about every picture he ever starred in—tuxedos have come to allude to elegance, sex appeal, and high society (or the desire to inhabit it). When women adopt the style, the symbolism only becomes more powerful.

In fact the tuxedo’s own history is somewhat surprising. The first one, designed by Henry Poole for the Prince of Wales (who later became King Edward VII), wasn’t actually formal wear at all–it was created for more casual dinners. At that time—in the mid-1860s—evening formal attire meant a white tie, white vest, and tailcoat. In contrast to the traditional offerings, Poole’s suit was the very first tailless evening jacket: he tailored a blue silk smoking jacket with matching pants for the Prince. The suit wasn’t called a tuxedo at all, but rather a smoking jacket. It wasn’t until 1885, after Poole had died and an American, James Brown Potter, saw the Prince of Wales wearing his smoking jacket on a visit to the UK, that the tuxedo gained mass appeal. Potter, who lived in the wealthy Hudson Valley enclave Tuxedo Park, brought the outfit back home. The coffee-tycon, who famously was married to socialite Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter, wore it to the Tuxedo Club Autumn Ball in 1886, and gave the garment its now official name. Around the same time, a group of well-to-do guys cut the tails off their coat jackets and started wearing the shortened style to formal events. When a group of men were admitted to the Dress Circle in the Metropolitan Opera in tuxedos, the signs became clear: the once casual tuxedo was now fit for formal events.

The tuxedo gradually faded out of style until the 1930s, when it not only resurfaced but was worn for the very first time by a woman. Enter Marlene Dietrich, the German film star who donned one for her role in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco. In 1930, the move was scandalous. And Dietrich, on and off screen, subverted expectations of gender and sexuality, dressing in menswear, looking to both male and female entertainers for style references, and having affairs with both men and women in the 1940s and ‘50s. She was bold and beautifully androgynous at a time far before gender fluidity or bisexuality was openly embraced.

Thirty-six years after Dietrich sported her first tuxedo, Yves Saint Laurent transformed the global fashion dialogue by introducing Le Smoking, the tuxedo expressly for women, in his Fall/Winter 1966 Pop Art collection. The suit was still considered controversial two years later when Nan Kempner wore hers to Le Côte Basqu in New York City and was denied entry. In response, the socialite, who Saint Laurent himself once called “la plus chic du monde,” took off her pants and entered the hotspot on 55th street in the blazer alone. The early female adopters of the tuxedo and YSL’s Le Smoking were unapologetically subversive.

By the 1970s, when Bianca Jagger donned a white smoking jacket for her wedding to Mick Jagger, public opinion had started to shift. Loulou de La Falaise, Lauren Bacall, and Catherine Deneuve wore the Niki de Saint Phalle-inspired suit. In 1975, Helmut Newton shot a model in the streets of Paris wearing a Le Smoking alongside a second nude woman. The statement was powerful: Female sexuality can extend beyond stereotypically feminized visions of appeal, and women can take charge of spaces that have long been male with no permission granted at all.

In the years since Yves Saint Laurent took the fashion scene by storm, women from Liza Minelli to Charlotte Rampling, Kate Moss, and Hillary Clinton have worn their own iterations of Le Smoking. Le Smoking is no longer radical, but it’s certainly chic—and the sense of power imbued by its history is still there.

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