In May we wrote about the menswear in Beijing, where two delegations met on common ground in dark navy and differentiated themselves through the smaller details. Last week the visit was returned. President Xi arrived in Washington for his first state visit here in more than a decade, and the evening that mattered most, sartorially, was Thursday’s state dinner in the East Room.
The invitation called for black tie. The American side answered it the way Washington always does: dinner jackets, bow ties, black shoes polished to a shine. President Trump was in a classic tuxedo. Even Jensen Huang, who set his leather jacket aside for a navy suit in Beijing, went a step further this time and wore a dinner jacket.
President Xi did not wear a tuxedo. Neither did senior officials Cai Qi or Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The senior Chinese officials in the room wore black Zhongshan suits, the high collared tunic most Americans know as the Mao suit.
It would be easy to read that as a refusal of the dress code. A tailor reads it differently.
What a Dress Code Actually Asks For
A dress code does not ask for a specific garment. It asks for a level of formality. Black tie means evening dress, and the rules of evening dress have always made room for national equivalents. A Scotsman in Highland evening wear is correctly dressed at a black tie dinner. So is an officer in mess dress. So is a head of state in the formal dress of his own country.
The one answer that does not work is the business suit. There is a recent precedent for exactly this. When President Hu Jintao attended a black tie state dinner in Washington in a lounge suit, he was widely noted as underdressed. The suit was not the problem. The register was.
President Xi solved that problem years ago by stepping outside the Western system entirely. Rather than wear a lesser version of our evening dress, he wears the highest register of his own. He has worn the Zhongshan to state banquets in Europe for the same reason. What was new last week was the rest of the delegation. On most foreign visits his senior officials wear Western suits while he alone wears the tunic. In the East Room, the most senior of them matched him.
A whole delegation, dressed in national evening wear, at a Washington black tie dinner. That is a genuinely unusual thing to see, and it was handled with complete correctness.
A dress code asks for a level of formality, not a specific garment.
The Garment Itself
The Zhongshan takes its name from Sun Yat-sen, known in China as Sun Zhongshan, who introduced the style after the founding of the republic in 1912. It has carried weight at the most formal moments of modern Chinese history ever since. When Deng Xiaoping made his historic 1979 visit to the United States, the Zhongshan was still part of the visual language of Chinese leadership. By the 1980s most Chinese leaders had moved to Western suits for daily public life and kept the Zhongshan for occasions of real ceremony.
The construction is deceptively simple: a closed five button front, four flapped pockets and a high collar that closes at the throat. No lapels, no shirt front, no tie.
That simplicity is exactly what makes it hard to cut well. A dinner jacket gives a tailor places to work. The lapel roll draws the eye, the shirt and bow tie break up the front, and the open chest forgives a great deal. A closed tunic forgives nothing. The collar has to sit cleanly on the neck all the way around, without standing away at the back or pressing at the throat. The front has to hang dead straight from five buttons with no pull at any of them. The pockets have to lie flat on the body, which means the chest and waist have to be shaped precisely beneath them. In black cloth, under the low candlelight of the East Room, every one of those points is either right or visibly wrong.
The garments on display were right. The tailoring was serious.
Two Rooms, One Evening
The contrast in the East Room was not between formal and informal. Every man there was formally dressed. It was between two complete systems of formality, each followed properly, side by side at the same tables.
The contrast was not between formal and informal. It was between two complete systems of formality.
That is worth sitting with, because it is rare. Most state dinners in this city are an exercise in convergence: visiting leaders adopt Western evening dress, and the photographs look like any other Washington gala. Thursday’s photographs look like two traditions sharing a room, each confident enough in its own conventions not to borrow the other’s.
The women made the point in reverse. Madame Peng Liyuan wore a long red gown, having moved through the visit in dresses that brought traditional Chinese details, a qipao inspired collar here, a traditionally cut sleeve there, into a modern line. The First Lady, meanwhile, skipped the gown altogether and borrowed from the language of the tuxedo: a white Saint Laurent blouse with an oversized bow, a black silk cummerbund, and black Dolce & Gabbana brocade trousers woven with peonies, a flower long prized in China. So the Chinese men wore national dress, and the American first lady wore the dinner suit’s vocabulary. It was the most menswear heavy state dinner in recent memory, and not only because of the men.
A Note From the Tarmac
One smaller moment from the arrival the day before deserves a mention. At Joint Base Andrews, on an unusually mild September day, President Trump met the Chinese plane in a full length dark overcoat and black leather gloves, removing one glove to shake President Xi’s hand. President Xi walked the red carpet in his suit alone.
Neither choice was wrong. The overcoat is a Washington man’s armor for formal outdoor occasions, and it frames the shoulders and lengthens the line in photographs in a way a suit alone does not. The absence of one, on a warm day, reads as ease. Two men, two instincts about how to present themselves in the first frame of a visit.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
Very few of our clients will ever be asked to decide how to answer a White House invitation on behalf of a nation. Many of them will face a smaller version of the same question: a black tie wedding abroad, a gala with an unfamiliar dress code, an evening where the host’s traditions are not quite their own.
The lesson from the East Room is that correctness is not the same as conformity. A dress code establishes a register. There can be more than one correct way to meet it.
What matters is that you meet it fully.
That is true whether the garment is a Zhongshan suit, Highland dress, mess dress or a dinner jacket. And the more formal the garment becomes, the more its execution matters. There are fewer places for mediocre fit to hide.
If you have a black tie evening on the calendar this season, our custom formalwear page is the place to start, and for the rarer invitation, our white tie page. Or come by the shop in Tysons. We are usually there.
Brett
