Top Hat and Tails (Strictly Private)

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While the dress coats were replaced by the frock coat from the 1840s as conventional formal daywear, top hats continued to be worn with frock coats as well as with what became known as formal evening wear white tie. Take notes from the designer, who favours a sharp, well-cut three-piece trouser suit ​​and opts for more of a modern look when it comes to hats. Towards the end of the Victorian era, white bow ties and waistcoats became the standard for full evening dress, contrasting with black bow ties and waistcoats or cummerbunds for black tie. The top hat gained acceptance thanks to the famous English dandy, George “Beau” Brummel (1778-1840), who became its first champion. After World War I, the dinner jacket became more popular, especially in the US, and informal variations sprang up, like the soft, turn-down collar shirt and later the double-breasted jacket; [10] relaxing social norms in Jazz Age America meant white tie was replaced by black tie as the default evening wear for young men, especially at nightclubs.

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Increasingly following the French Revolution, high society men abandoned the richly decorated justaucorps coats for more austere cutaway dress coats in dark colours, with cuts perhaps further inspired by the frocks and riding coats of country gentlemen. Despite its growing popularity, the dinner jacket remained the reserve of family dinners and gentlemen's clubs during the late Victorian period.The characteristic snapping sound heard upon opening a gibus suggested a third name, the chapeau claque, from French: claque, meaning "slap". By the early 19th-century Regency era, dark dress tailcoats with light trousers became standard daywear, while black and white became the standard colours for evening wear. The dinner jacket (black tie/tuxedo) emerged as a less formal and more comfortable alternative to full evening dress in the 1880s.

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Black antique silk top hats are conidered the height of beauty and elegance because of their impressive shine, shape and lightness, which is second to none.The song is performed in 1989's Secret Policeman's Third Ball by comedian/satirist Willie Rushton, accompanied by Richard Vranch on piano, with Rushton dressing according to the lyrics of the song, noting that the lyrics neglect to mention the donning of trousers. The Modernisation Select Committee commented that "This particular practice has almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other".

Top Hat and Tails - Etsy UK Top Hat and Tails - Etsy UK

The custom is said to have started at the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London on a hot day, when the Chazzan was preparing for a service and decided that it was too hot to wear his wig, throwing it out of the window in a fit of bad temper. Women wear a full-length evening dress, with the option of jewellery, a tiara, a pashmina, coat or wrap, and long white gloves. The collapsible silk opera hat, or crush hat, is still worn on occasions, and black in color if worn with evening wear as part of white tie, [21] and is still made by a few companies, of the traditional materials of satin or grosgrain silk. In popular culture, the top hat is frequently comic, subversive or ridiculous – worn by such varied characters as Willy Wonka, stage magicians, steampunk cosplayers, the Fat Controller and Slash from Guns n’ Roses. When wearing an antique top hat, special care should always be taken when setting it down on a flat surface.With the nuances of dress codes to navigate (suits for women are in; as are elegant headbands with a diameter of 10cm) spectators have become more fashion-savvy than ever before. The top hat’s swan song may have been Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s 1935 film of the same name, one of the most famous of the duo’s performances, in which Astaire wears a top hat with an elegance and panache to rival Brummel himself ( and famously dances with one too).