The Most Formal Dress Codes

A dress code lands in this band when the invitation has taken almost every choice away from you. Formality 9 and 10 is the territory of the tailcoat and the tuxedo, of floor length, of a specific shirt, a specific shoe and a specific hour of the day. Four codes sit here. Three of them are evening codes and one of them belongs to the daytime, and that single distinction is the most useful thing in the whole band, because the mistake people make at this level is almost never about the quality of what they wore. It is about the hour the garment was made for. What these four share is that the host has already told you what to bring. Nobody writes White Tie hoping to see your interpretation of it. At this level a code is closer to a specification than to a suggestion, and reading it as a suggestion is what produces the guest who is visibly the least formal person in the room. If you are unsure whether an invitation belongs in this band, look at what it actually asks for rather than at how expensive the event sounds. A five hundred dollar ticket does not make an event White Tie, and a village hall wedding at eleven in the morning can genuinely be Morning Dress.

White Tie is the ceiling. A black tailcoat that is cut away at the front and never buttons, a white piqué waistcoat, a white winged collar shirt, a white bow tie, and on the other side of the room a floor length gown, usually with gloves. It is worn after six in the evening and almost nowhere else. Black Tie is the code most people in this band will actually meet. A dinner jacket with a satin or grosgrain facing, a black bow tie you tie yourself, a pleated or piqué shirt, and a gown or a very formal cocktail length dress. It is also an evening code, and the same invitation written for the afternoon would be wrong. Morning Dress is the daytime opposite number. A morning coat with tails, striped or checked trousers, a waistcoat and usually a top hat, worn with a day dress and a hat rather than a gown. It is the code for a wedding that begins before five, and it is the code people most often confuse with Black Tie because both involve tails. Tenue de Soirée is not a fourth garment at all. It is a French line on an invitation that translates as evening wear, and in practice it asks for Black Tie unless the host has written something more specific beside it. Reading it as a licence to improvise is the usual error. When a European host wants something looser they write it in words, and the fact that they reached for the formal phrase is the instruction.

Very few people move upward out of this band, because there is nowhere above White Tie to go. The movement that matters runs downward, and it happens in two steps. The step below Black Tie is Black Tie Optional, which sits at 8 and genuinely permits a dark suit. The two lines are not the same instruction and hosts write the second one far more often, so read the invitation twice before you assume you have been let off. Below that sits Formal and its relatives, where a dark suit stops being a concession and becomes the expected answer. Moving down from Morning Dress works differently, because the daytime formal ladder is short. Under Morning Dress there is really only a dark suit worn well, which is what Lounge Suit and Tenue de Ville describe. There is no daytime equivalent of the dinner jacket, so a guest who cannot get hold of a morning coat should reach for the best plain dark suit available rather than for anything with a satin facing. Reaching sideways into evening wear during the day is the one move that reliably looks worse than being underdressed. If an invitation in this band leaves you genuinely stuck, ask the host what the other guests are wearing. At this level of formality that question is normal and hosts expect it, which is not true further down the scale.

The first mistake is the clip on bow tie. At Black Tie and above the tie is meant to be tied, and the difference is visible from across a room because a tied bow is never quite symmetrical. The second is the black suit standing in for a dinner jacket. A suit in black worsted has no satin facing on the lapel, no braid down the trouser and the wrong buttons, and under ballroom lighting it reads as flat and slightly dusty next to real evening cloth. If a dinner jacket is out of reach, midnight blue is the better rescue than black. The third is the daytime error already described, wearing evening formality to a ceremony that begins at noon. The fourth is footwear. This band expects a patent or highly polished leather shoe with a thin sole, and a heavy welted brogue undoes an otherwise correct outfit at the ankle. The fifth is fit, which matters more here than anywhere else on the scale, because these garments are cut close and structured and any excess cloth is obvious. A rented dinner jacket that has been taken in at the waist beats an owned one that has not, every time, and most rental shops in a large city can do that within a week.