ON DRESS

Eight Words

The Court’s calendar gives every engagement a dress code, and there are eight of them: White Tie, Black Tie, Morning Dress, Lounge Suit, Smart Casual, Country Attire, Yachting Attire and Tennis Whites. The distribution is not what an outsider expects. On the calendar as it stands, white tie is asked at ten engagements and morning dress at four. The lounge suit is asked at more than a hundred. The ordinary condition of the season is a dark suit and a tie, and the grand codes are the exceptions that mark the grand nights.

The Lexicon defines each code, and nearly every definition carries its reason. Country attire “is working dress before it is anything else, and it is judged by whether it would survive the day it is worn for.” Yachting attire is soft soles, white or navy, “and nothing that will blow away”, because “a black sole marks a deck and the owner will notice.” Tennis whites go back to a rule of the 1880s, “when a visible sweat mark was thought improper”. Black tie was devised as informal dress for dining at home, “which is why it remains the lesser of the two evening codes.”

Read this way, a code is information. It says what the ground is like, how long the day lasts, what the host fears, and how high the occasion means to stand. A guest who reads it closely learns about the place before arriving.

The Ground Decides

The plainest evidence is in the field. On the Glorious Twelfth nothing is published, since no one holds the day, but the custom is tweed in greens and browns, and “Nothing white or bright, because grouse have exceptional eyesight.” At the Cheltenham Festival country attire “is the real thing here rather than a costume. It rains, the ground is Gloucestershire clay, and anyone in town shoes regrets it by the second race.” For Sailing and Regatta Crewing the instruction is soft shoes with non-marking soles: “Hard soles scratch a deck and slip when it is wet.”

None of this is taste. A white shirt on a grouse moor spoils the drive for the line; a hard sole on a teak deck damages someone else’s boat. The code protects the occasion and the other people at it, and the wearer’s appearance comes a distant second.

The same reasoning governs the Court’s use of the least formal of its codes. Smart casual, in the Lexicon’s words, is used “only where a suit would be wrong: a tennis stadium in forty degrees, a golf course, a race that runs through the night.” At the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix nothing is published, and the Court’s version is “a jacket without a tie, proper trousers and proper shoes, and no logos.” The race is run in the heat of early September, and the day ends with a walk through a park. The code relaxes because the day demands it, and stops relaxing at the point where the day no longer does.

Rope and Custom

Where a code is published, the Almanac records where it is enforced, and the answer is usually not the gate. At Royal Ascot there are four codes, “each is enforced at the entrance to its own enclosure rather than at the gate to the racecourse. A person may buy a Queen Anne badge, walk the length of the course, and be turned back at the Royal Enclosure rope.” At the Vienna Opera Ball white tie “is not negotiable”, and “a cocktail dress will not pass the door.”

Other houses keep their standard without a rule. At Glyndebourne Festival Opera, “Black tie is the custom rather than a rule, and the audience keeps to it.” The Metropolitan Opera asks little on ordinary nights (“While there is no dress code at the Met,” it says), but opening night is black tie by its own listing, and the Opera Club, whose members are known as the Penguins, keeps a stricter rule of its own. A custom held by a whole audience is as firm as any rope, and more interesting, since nobody is checking.

One Level Above

The Court’s own practice follows from this. Where a venue publishes a code, the Court follows it. Where a code is published as a floor, the Court dresses a level above it; the entries say so in nearly those words, “A lounge suit, one level above what is asked.” Where nothing is published, the Court dresses “to the register” of the occasion, a phrase that recurs from the drawing room to the riverbank.

The distinction between dress and costume matters here. Goodwood Revival encourages the clothes of 1948 to 1966, and does not require them; the Court’s choice is a lounge suit cut to the period. The entry quotes the risk of getting it wrong in the other direction: modern clothes, “against a field of tweed and tea dresses they feel like a tracksuit at a wedding”. At Cheltenham, tweed is the real thing; at Goodwood, period cloth is a courtesy to a game everyone has agreed to play. Both are reading the room.

The Case Against

The objection to all this is serious and deserves its full weight. Dress codes have long worked as fences. They require clothes that cost money and take time to acquire, and they reward those who were taught the rules young over those who had to learn them. They have been policed unevenly, and at least once against women in particular. In 2015, the entry for the Cannes Film Festival records, women in flat shoes were turned away from a premiere, and the festival then said its rules had never asked for heels. The Court’s own entry for The Cigar Room says of the Victorian smoking room that “The arrangement rested on an exclusion and that is not defended here.”

There is a rival ideal of openness, and it has its own dignity. The BBC tells the audience at the Last Night of the Proms: “Come as you are: there is no dress code at the Proms.” Some come in fancy dress, anything from dinner jackets to patriotic T-shirts.

The Court’s answer is not to deny the history but to point at what a code can do when it is published and kept evenly. A code that is written down can be learned; the Lexicon says at its head that “Nobody arrives knowing all of this. That is what the page is for.” A code can also level a room rather than sort it. At The Masquerade Ball, black tie and a mask are required, and the entry explains why the Venetians wore the mask at all: a man in a bauta “could not be placed”, and the mask was worn at official business “because it took rank out of the room.” The White Tie Dinner asks for decorations from those who hold them and forbids the rest to pretend: those who hold none “do not invent decorations to wear”, since “A tasteful absence is always preferable to a questionable presence.”

The codes also move. Ascot now admits coloured waistcoats, full-length jumpsuits and matching trouser suits in the Royal Enclosure, and Cannes now allows shoes with or without a heel. And the Court keeps its own standard at the Proms, in a lounge suit, without asking the Hall to match it. A standard held for oneself is a different thing from a standard imposed on others.

What the Court Asks

The Lexicon lists dress first among the things the Code asks of those who sit at the Court’s table, before punctuality, the camera and discretion. It is stated plainly and held to.

It also asks something practical in advance. At The Wardrobe, a morning in early March with a tailor and a shirtmaker, the Court’s calendar decides a good deal of what gets ordered: “A member who means to keep the season needs morning dress by June and white tie by December, and both take months.” The black tie of the Lexicon is tied by hand. And on the Glorious Twelfth, where nothing is published because no one holds the day, the entry records the Court’s choice in four words: “The Court wears a tie.”