The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is, in Washington terms, an unusual evening. It is formal in a city that does not always commit to formal, it is photographed in a way most events here never are, and it brings together a room that has almost no equivalent on the calendar – journalists, principals, agency leadership, ambassadors, a great many people from California and New York who only come to Washington for this – all of them pressed into one of the larger ballrooms in the city for one of the longer Saturdays in April.
We dressed a number of our clients for this year’s dinner. As is always the case, we will not say who; the privilege of being a tailor for the kind of clientele we serve is the privilege of declining to talk about it. But we have been doing this long enough – fifty-seven years, this spring – to say something about the room, and about why a thoughtfully built tuxedo holds up in it where a rented one does not.
What the room actually rewards
The first thing to understand about the Correspondents’ Dinner is that it is, sartorially, not a Hollywood event. It is a Washington event with Hollywood guests in it. The room does not reward novelty. The flashbulb-friendly burgundy velvet shawl-collar, the patterned dinner jacket, the collarless evening shirt – these read as a New York or a Los Angeles answer to a question Washington is not asking. The Washington answer is quieter. A peak-lapel single-breasted dinner jacket in barathea or a fine wool-mohair, properly fitted, with grosgrain or satin facings that match the trouser stripe. A pleated bib shirt or a marcella front, fastened with stud buttons, with a turnover or a wing collar. A black bow tie, hand-tied, a width that flatters the wearer’s face. Black patent or a properly polished black calf shoe, depending on preference. That is the suit. It does not change. It has not changed in a long time, and it will outlast everyone now wearing it.
The reason this matters is partly aesthetic and partly practical. The Correspondents’ Dinner runs long. There is a cocktail hour, a seated dinner, a program that depending on the year and the speaker can run an hour or more, and an after-event circuit of post-parties that for many guests stretches past midnight. A dinner jacket built to last that arc is a particular garment. A rented dinner jacket – built to fit nobody specifically and to be returned the following Tuesday – is not.
A rented dinner jacket - built to fit nobody specifically and to be returned the following Tuesday - is not the same garment.
The photograph again
We wrote earlier this year about the photographic permanence of inauguration imagery, and the same logic applies here, with the additional complication that a Correspondents’ Dinner photograph travels faster and reads in tighter crop. The cameras are at the table, on the carpet, at the post-parties, in the elevators. A jacket that pulls across the chest, a sleeve that breaks too far down on the wrist, a shirt collar that gaps because the shirt was not made for the wearer’s neck – none of these read at conversational distance, but all of them read in a photograph at twelve inches.
The fix is precision in the cut. A custom tuxedo is built to the wearer’s measurements – twenty-five-plus of them – with a chest that lies clean against the shirt, a sleeve that ends where the cuff is meant to live, a trouser that breaks once and softly on the instep. These are not extravagances. They are the difference between a garment that disappears into the picture and a garment that stays in the picture for the wrong reasons.
On construction, briefly
A tuxedo is the hardest garment a tailor builds, because it has to look effortless, and effortlessness is mostly a function of construction. The chest is canvassed. The collar is cut from the cloth and stitched by hand. The lapel is rolled, not pressed. The trouser stripe is a continuous run from waistband to hem. The shirt closes square at the neck, and the bow tie sits where the collar wants it to sit. Every one of those decisions matters at twelve inches, and every one of them gets made – or not made – at the moment the garment is being built.
We do not build fused garments in our shop. We never have. The reason is most evident in formalwear: a fused tuxedo, by hour four of an evening, develops the slightly stiffened, slightly waved chest that is the visual signature of a garment glued together rather than sewn. A canvassed tuxedo, properly broken in, simply does not do this. It moves with the wearer, holds its line through dinner and the program and the after-parties, and goes back on the hanger at two in the morning ready for the next one.
What a custom tuxedo is for
A custom tuxedo, made well, is a garment a man owns for fifteen or twenty years. It rotates through anniversaries, through state dinners, through embassy receptions and chamber-of-commerce galas, through the kind of black-tie wedding that has become more common in this city in the last decade. It earns its commission over time. The most senior of our formalwear clients have tuxedos of ours that are well into a second decade and look, with periodic care, exactly the way they did when they walked out of the shop.
The math, for a man who attends formal events three or four times a year, is favorable. A rented tuxedo at $250 to $400 a wearing, over fifteen years, is a great many wearings and a great deal of money for a garment that never quite fit. A custom tuxedo from us starts at $1,095 in the half-canvas baseline – the premium over our suit floor reflects what makes a tuxedo a tuxedo: satin lapels, satin-covered buttons, a satin side stripe down the trouser, real silk and not a printed substitute. From there the same construction-grade ladder applies – full canvas, fully handmade, presidential – and the garment lives in the closet ready for whatever the calendar produces.
The week after
The dinner is over now. The post-parties have packed up; the photographs are being filed. For the clients we dressed, we will see most of them again sooner than they might think – the spring season in this city does not exactly slow down after April. For anyone reading this who watched the coverage and noted, perhaps for the first time, that a tuxedo can in fact look like it belongs to its wearer – that conversation is one we are happy to start any time.
You can read more on our custom formalwear page, or come by the shop in Tysons. We are usually there.
– Brett
