When it was common for men to wear a dinner jacket there was room for variation in semi-formal evening wear. You could include a midnight blue tuxedo, and a ecru dinner jacket or cotton madras dinner jacket for summer in your wardrobe.

Footwear could vary too. Men were allowed to swap black patent leather shoes with white loafers in those warm and light summer nights. The short spencer jacket was a solution as well, at least in sartorial magazines. Smoking jackets were seen in winter.

The only things you couldn’t change were the dark bow tie, the white shirt, and, save the Duke of Windsor and a Scotsman in trews, the dark trousers.

Photo: The Journal of Style