Category: Black tie

My Cifonelli velvet jacket The cloth that you select for a tuxedo (or black tie) probably won’t get as much thought as the design, the shirt or indeed your bow tie. The options are fairly limited, and all those other t...

  One of the things I enjoy most about Permanent Style is the comments from readers.  It’s like each article is a new thread in a forum, with subject raised and then comments, experiences and questions all follow...

  Great as Instagram is, a definite flaw is its lack of an effective archive. There’s no way to search old images, so unless you save an image yourself, you can’t find old pieces or browse effectively.  Jus...

Coverage of our events last week in New York is going to work in reverse. First, here, is the party after the Symposium - which Anderson & Sheppard customer John Demsey (Executive Group President, Estée Lauder) hel...

This is the first in a series of articles looking back at suits I have had made by the world’s major tailors, and examining their style through a consistent set of parameters and images. For background and context, see...

Thank you everyone that responded to my ‘You are the interviewer’ post a couple of weeks ago. The number of variety of questions was staggering, and I will try to answer as many as I can over the coming weeks. It ma...

As requested by readers, here is the video coverage we took on the night at our Huntsman dinner a couple of weeks ago. The sound quality isn't perfect (our fault) but you can certainly hear the short explanation I gave ...

As mentioned in my original post about this reader competition, our aim was to explore the different forms formalwear can take today.  Men will always have a need to dress up, in order to appear appropriately for a sm...

Meekal Hashmi Last week’s readers dinner was, perhaps surprisingly, one of the more enjoyable evenings I’ve had in a long time. I say surprisingly because, as lovely as all the readers were certainly going to be, it...

    So, Huntsman invited me to host a dinner in their Savile Row shop in January.   And rather than invite people from the industry (as we did last time in our Gathering dinner) I thought it would be nice to have re...

   One of the nicest aspects of the Bespoke Tailors Benevolent Association dinner every year is the evening wear. Although most cutters and tailors aren’t actually into clothes and style, they are all wearing som...

  Dress way the hell up, as our American cousins might say. New Year’s Eve is a special event, and it deserves a special effort where our clothes are concerned. That doesn’t have to be black tie, as above, ...

Beautiful, but will you wear it?   Dear Simon, I have been quite busy in the last seven years building a wardrobe that will seem modest by your standards, but is still quite substantial for me. And obviously once you st...

For the first time last month, the numbers of visits to Permanent Style topped 250,000. (That’s visits, not visitors – which is less – or impressions – which is more.) In the past six months our t...

  This drawing from The Tailor & Cutter is lovely; but it’s not really my style. Not because a white dinner jacket would be too showy unless I were dining in truly balmy weather. But, rather, because everythi...

The Burma shade summer dinner jacket Esquire, August 1936: “The old summer formal combination of blue jacket and white flannels got the gong because of its obvious incongruity with summer evening dresses. “He...

The fair haired boy of the beach walk Esquire, January 1935: “This is the semi-formal evening outfit that will be worn by the best-dressed men at Palm Beach this winter. It consists of a white shawl collar dinner j...

I have a friend that loves black suits. Can’t get enough of them. For him, a black suit and a white shirt are the chicest things a man can wear. He is a big fan of Reservoir Dogs, so that might have influence him somew...

I had heard ‘stories’ about treasures found in second-hand shops before. The way it goes, one day the author is browsing through the racks while his girlfriend tries on shoes, and all of a sudden he discovers an Ande...

MC: Simon, I’m interested in your thoughts on a waistcoat pairing for my upcoming wedding. My tuxedo is single button, peak lapel (grosgrain). I have flexibility on the shirt style (wing or standard collar) and the wai...

Criticism of what people wear to black-tie events tends to focus on obvious sins: wearing a lounge suit, wearing a coloured tie and wearing a long tie instead of a bow ( though this is less objectionable than one may thi...

During comments on a recent posting, discussion of the use of the word ‘correct’ came up in reference to black tie. Unfortunately, that word has almost no firm meaning today in reference to menswear. Even with regard...

Aren’t you just sick of celebrities turning up to the Oscars in a four-in-hand tie? A black tie event demands a bow tie. A long tie may be trendier, but this is an outfit steeped in history. History and tradition deman...