BLACK BEAUTY

Few of us get to sashay into a Savile Row atelier one day, parietal lobes awash with creative whimsy, and request a garment that will change sartorial history. But that’s what happened in 1865, when the future King Edward VII went into Henry Poole and asked his good friend the proprietor to make something less formal than tails to wear to a dinner at Sandringham in Norfolk. The resulting evening lounge jacket, cut from dark blue silk, captured the attention of a friend visiting the prince from the U.S., who had another one made and took it back to Tuxedo Park in Orange County, New York. “This,” he declared to friends who asked him what he was wearing, “is what the King wears in London.” The rest, as they say, is history.

The tux, and black-tie eveningwear as a whole, has evolved in the century and a half since that fateful appointment with Poole, but certain timeless aspects of) is a regular on the red carpets, as it makes for a slimmer silhouette.