THE DECLINE OF THE FORMAL OCCASION

The Case for Decline

The evidence is real, and it is old. In 1922 Emily Post held tails “necessary only at balls, formal dinners, and in a box at the opera”. After the First World War white tie was, in one magazine’s words, “almost abandoned”. Kennedy wore it to his inaugural ball in 1961, the last president to do so.

Britain took away its own centrepiece. The last debutantes were presented at the Court of St James’s in 1958, after which Queen Elizabeth II abolished the ceremony. Parties were arranged for the young women who would otherwise have been presented, but “the withdrawal of royal patronage made these occasions decreasingly significant”, and the last Queen Charlotte’s Ball under Elizabeth II was held in 1976.

The great houses of music now ask little of their audiences. “While there is no dress code at the Met,” the Metropolitan Opera says, “we recommend comfortable clothing appropriate for a professional setting”; dressing more formally for galas and new productions is customary, “but this is optional.” The BBC tells the audience for the Last Night of the Proms: “Come as you are: there is no dress code at the Proms.” The Bayreuth Festival, in the house Wagner built, publishes no dress code at all, only the festive character of the evening.

A century, then, in which the state stopped presenting, the presidents stopped wearing tails, and the opera houses stopped asking. That is the case, and it should be stated at full strength.

Why It Happened

Three causes run through the entries.

The first is war. The Philadelphia Assemblies, founded in the winter of 1748 and by its own account the oldest continuing annual subscription ball in the United States, stopped for a time during the Civil War and again from 1941 to 1946.

The second is politics. From 1951 La Scala Opening Night was “la più mondana della città”, the most worldly evening in Milan, and a committee of tailors judged the most elegant lady in the foyer. Then came the protests. In 1968 the theatre announced that evening dress would not be required. Outside, students threw eggs at the furs, and after an egg hit a gentleman’s dinner jacket came “uova, cachi, vernice rossa”, eggs, persimmons and red paint. Dress had become a statement about class, and some in the audience no longer wished to make it.

The third is a change in what people would put up with. One account of the end of court presentation gives the reasons plainly: British society “was becoming more egalitarian”, more debutantes went to college, and those taking part had complained of “the physical and financial burden”.

Formality Was Always Sliding

The slide is older than any of these causes, because formality has always been sliding. The dinner jacket itself began as the informal choice. The earliest tailless evening coat on record was made by Henry Poole & Co. in 1865 for the Prince of Wales to wear at Sandringham. It was “considered informal wear”, and the etiquette guides held it “inappropriate for wear in mixed company”. In October 1886, at the first Autumn Ball at Tuxedo Park, Griswold Lorillard and his friends wore “a tailless dress coat”, and America had its tuxedo.

What one generation calls a relaxation, the next calls a standard. Black tie, once the dress of a stag evening, is now what the audience at Glyndebourne Festival Opera wears to picnic on a lawn in Sussex. There it is “the custom rather than a rule, and the audience keeps to it.”

The useful question is therefore never whether a code has relaxed. It always has. The question is whether anything still stands at the new level, and the entries say that a good deal does.

What Survived: The Enclosure

The first survivor is the graded code. Royal Ascot has not one dress code but four, each “enforced at the entrance to its own enclosure rather than at the gate to the racecourse”, and “The code tightens as one moves from the rail toward the Parade Ring.” In the Royal Enclosure the morning coat and top hat are still worn. At The Epsom Derby morning dress is required in the Queen Elizabeth II Stand on Derby Day, while “The Grandstand and the Hill have no code.” At Henley Royal Regatta the Stewards’ Enclosure asks for a lounge suit or a blazer with a tie, and jackets come off only when the Stewards announce it for the day; “The Regatta Enclosure has no rule, and the blazers come out anyway.”

Formality did not leave these occasions. It withdrew into a part of each and let the rest of the ground go free. That is a retreat, but it is also a settlement. The code is kept where people have chosen to keep it, and nobody else is made to.

What Survived: The Society

The second survivor is the occasion kept by a body with a reason to keep it. The Washington Birthday Ball has been given almost every year since 1877 by the Sons of the Revolution, and pays to keep Fraunces Tavern standing; its hundred and fiftieth falls in 2027. The Holland Society holds its 136th Dinner Dance on 24 October 2026. In New York the Al Smith Dinner is held in white tie for the eighty-first time on 15 October 2026, and the Viennese Opera Ball held its seventieth in May 2026, with “white tie and tails for gentlemen, long ball gowns for ladies”.

These are not unchanged, and some have grown quieter. The Philadelphia Assemblies had more than seventeen hundred subscribers in the 1980s. It now describes itself as “an annual gathering of family and friends in Philadelphia”, and publishes neither its date nor its room. What has kept these evenings going is not the public’s appetite for formality, which comes and goes, but a society that sets the date each year whatever the public thinks.

The Strongest Objection

The strongest case against regretting any of this is that the old formal occasion was a machine for exclusion, and that its decline was a gain. The entries give that case its evidence. The Assemblies shut out the Loyalists in the Revolution: “Such characters are either too detestable or too insignificant for Whig society.” It still keeps admission by heredity in the male line. The Holland Society’s founders admitted only men who could prove descent in the direct male line from a settler of New Netherland. Presentation at court decided, in public, who was in society and who was not. On this view the dress code was the uniform of a closed door, and the door was right to give way.

The entries suggest an answer, though not a complete one. Exclusion was not what made these occasions last. The Holland Society’s male-line rule “has gone”, and membership is open to men and women of the line. In the Society of Mayflower Descendants, which gives The Mayflower Ball, the line “may run through a man or a woman.” Where the formal occasion survived, it usually survived by opening.

And the defence of formality that has lasted is not about rank at all. In 1972, four years after the eggs, La Scala’s superintendent Paolo Grassi defended the dark suit: «L’abito scuro è un segno di rispetto per chi lavora in teatro», the dark suit is a mark of respect for those who work in the theatre. That is an argument formality can still make in public. It makes no claim about who belongs in the room. It makes a claim about what the room owes the people who made the evening.

Where the Court Stands

The Court dresses to the published code, and where a venue offers a choice it takes the higher: at Trooping the Colour the Household Division asks for morning dress or a lounge suit in the stands, and the Court wears morning dress. Where nothing is required, as at the Proms, the Court still wears a lounge suit.

It keeps two evenings of its own on the same principle. The White Tie Dinner, in late October, exists to keep once a year what Debrett’s calls “the most formal event code, and the rarest”. The Black Tie Dinner, in December, exists because black tie began as the dress of an evening among friends. Neither is a rebuke to the Met or the Proms. On those two evenings the code is stated in the invitation and kept by everyone in the room.