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 the exclusive country club in Tuxedo Park, New York. Tuxedo Park, which was founded in the 1880s by a group of prominent and wealthy New Yorkers as a residential club colony, was an "informally formal" community. Apparently, the society had had enough of tails, which had traditionally been worn for formal eveningwear, because Lorillard's "invention" was immediately well received in even the stuffiest of circles. The use of the term "tuxedo," sometimes lamentably abbreviated to "tuck," or, even worse, to "tux," is pretty much confined to the United States and Australia. The garment is known abroad, and generally in this country as well, by its correct name "the dinner jacket," or "dinner coat." The dinner coat would never, if ever, be called a "tuxedo" in Tuxedo Park.
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