1898 illustration of a tuxedo dinner jacket. Illustration of two gentlemen wearing formal dinner jackets, one with peaked lapels and the other with a shawl collar.
8 June 2022
The dinner jacket is named for a town in New York where it first became stylish in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Tuxedo and Tuxedo Park are towns in New York, in the Hudson River valley just north of the border with New Jersey. The towns take their names from the Munsee *ptukwsiituw (there are members of the wolf clan); the Munsee people, a subgroup of the Delaware or Lenape nation, are associated with the wolf. The Munsee ptukwsiit (round foot) can refer to wolves, dogs, foxes, and bears.
The placename Tuxedo, spelled at first as Tucseto and Tuxseto, appears in colonial records as early as 1735. The exclusive community of Tuxedo Park was created in 1885 by the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV, and the club there opened the following year.
Shortly after the club’s opening, men attending events there began to wear tailless dinner jackets in lieu of the more traditional tailed coats. Tailless dinner jackets had been known in England since the 1860s, when the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, took to wearing them at private dinner parties. But the dinner jackets were informal attire, a way of dressing down. It wasn’t until the dinner jacket was imported into America several decades later that it started to replace the traditional white-tie attire.
Tuxedo as a name for the jacket appears in print by 1888. The earliest use I have found is from August 1888 and refers to Bar Harbor Maine, showing that the name had quickly spread from the original Tuxedo Club:
One would imagine that a man’s idea of comfort and cleanliness would forbid his wearing to a hop in the evening the same flannels in which he had played tennis all day, and certainly decorum should prevent his asking a lady to dance with him in such a costume. The Tuxedo coat has become popular with a great many men who regard its demi train as a happy medium between a swallowtail and a cutaway, but there are always some men at the hops in flannels, dancing with whoever will dance with them, regardless of both cleanliness and courtesy.
And there is this from Washington, DC’s Evening Star of 5 November 1888:
Despite ridicule and hostility the curtailed dress-coat has fought its way into a vacant niche in the gentlemen’s wardrobe, and may tritely but truly be described as filling a long-felt want. In England the new garment has been known for some time past as the “Cowes coat,” and in this country it has taken the aristocratic title, the “Tuxedo.”
Sources:
“Bad Manners at Bar Harbor” (18 August 1888). New York Herald, 19 August 1888, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Grumet, Robert S. Manhattan to Minisink: American Indian Place Names in Greater New York and Vicinity. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2013.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tuxedo, n.
“Tailless Dress Coats.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 5 November 1888, 6.
Image credit: W.D.F. Vincent, 1898, The Cutter's Practical Guide to Jacket Cutting and Making. Public domain image.