The concept of wearing black for evening wear was, according to the English mens clothing historian James Laver, first introduced by the nineteenth-century British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who utilised it "as a romantic gesture to show that he was a `blighted being' and very, very melancholy."

The dinner jacket or dinner suit originated in the United States in 1896, when a celebrated dandy named Griswold Lorillard (from the tobacco magnate family) wore it to a white-tie-and-tails ball at
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