I hate to upset British and American readers, but I have found a source, which claims that the French introduced the dinner jacket. It doesn’t cancel the tale that the dinner jacket appeared with the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII in 1865, when he ordered a smoking jacket at Henry Poole’s for private use. Neither does it take much away from the Tuxedo Park incident in 1886, when young rebels wore a jacket instead of tails, which introduced the dinner jacket – the tuxedo – to the States.
It honours, though, the French as the ones, who started wearing dinner jackets outside home.
All right, it could have been Englishmen and Americans, who wore the first dinner jackets in public. But, in that case, it took place on French soil, if Monte Carlo is a part of that.
You may think that the source is a Frenchman. It is not. The source, according to English fashion historian Thalassa Cruso, is in fact full-blown British. It is editor in the 1920s and 1930s of The Tailor and Cutter, the then leading journal worldwide on bespoke tailoring. The editor told Thalassa Cruso that the dinner jacket was introduced at the casinos in Monto Carlo in 1880.
I have searched for paintings and photography from that period about Monte Carlo but I haven’t found anything from around 1880, which supports the claim. However, I have stumpled upon a painting from 1890 by Jean-Georges Beraud, which shows men in black evening jackets at the tables in Monte Carlo (check arrows). Maybe they had been lounging that way for 10 years already. Who knows.
Below the piece from Thalassa Cruso’s “Costume” (London Museum, 1936), which establish the French connection:
“As an informal alternative to the full evening-dress with tailed coat, the dinner-jacket – based upon the somewhat similar smoking-jacket – has been in vogue since the latter part of the nineteenth century. This style is supposed to have originated in 188o at Monte Carlo, where men playing at the tables found it tiring to sit for long periods in tailed coats; the tailless coat was therefore devised for this special purpose (1). The fashion spread rapidly and replaced the velvet smoking-jacket as suitable dress for private wear. Not until after
the death of King Edward was the dinner-jacket accepted as possible public dress, but its popularity increased rapidly during and after the War.
(1) Information kindly supplied by the Editor of The Tailor and Cutter.”
Painting: The Casino at Monte Carlo (Rien ne va plus!) by Jean-Georges Beraud (1890)