For some of us, black tie dinners are an occupational hazard. At some point it's likely you'll be invited to one. Few men own a black-tie outfit and so there are dress-hire shops. You only have to get measured, pick your outfit up a day or two before the event & drop it back off after. Hiring is cost-effective, convenient and it's how most of us start with formal dress. For these reasons Button Stance tailoring has no wish to criticise what they offer, but we do want to pose a question: How many times do you need to go to a black tie event before hiring outweighs the cost of buying your own?
Some numbers: UK rental cost to hire a dinner jacket/tuxedo, trousers, a pre-tied bow-tie, pleated shirt and, if you need them, cummerbund, shoes & cufflinks, starts at approximately £80 a time but you can pay more. Two dinners a year is of course £160 but then let's add the time-cost & petrol for picking up & dropping off afterwards. If you are paid by the hour then perhaps this now increases to £250 a year depending on how close to your workplace your dress-hire shop is and whether you get the time to drop off over lunch-hour. Over five years this could rack up £1,250, over 10 years £2,500 plus a little inflation maybe closer to £3,000 assuming you only go twice a year. How does the value-for-money sound now?
Let's go over some downsides of hiring as well. Whatever you hire will be off-the-peg and will not fit you perfectly. Hire garments are mass-produced and somewhere or other the fit will be off; perhaps a collar-gap or if you're barrel-chested you'll need a size so big that to button it closed the sleeves will cover your knuckles. We have spoken before about the importance of fit and how sloppy you can appear if the shoulder width, sleeve or jacket length don't suit your height & build. Only tailored trousers will hit the right ankle length to just touch the top of your shoes & no more, where hired trousers bunch-up, puddling over the top of your shoes as in the lower of the two photos below. Sadly, sights like these are all too common at black-tie events, with hundreds of men looking like they're wearing each others' clothes.
Some more downsides to renting: mass-produced dinner jackets and trousers are made from the roughest fabrics. They have to be able to withstand food and wine-stains and repeated dry-cleaning. And then there's the sheer hassle of the pick-up & drop-off. Time out from your working day, sitting in traffic, your lunch hour might not be enough & on Monday after the event, your enthusiasm probably flags too.
So perhaps the value-for-money for buying your own dinner suit isn't as bad as it first appears, but still; why bother when a couple of hundred guys in a function suite all wear the same thing and it's impossible to stand out? As we said above: fit is King and the minor details are indeed noticeable. Only a tailored suit is cut for your waist and your waist only, your shoulder-width and your chest. Buying tailored means you also get to choose some other colour than black and softer fabric as well.
A final note because there's still one more benefit: knowing its in your wardrobe means you look for other opportunities to wear it. If you own your own outfit then you can accept an invitation at short notice. This isn't uncommon and who knows where surprise invitations can lead. For Christmas or New Year dinner with the family or romantic weekend at a hotel for your anniversary, your dinner jacket will look just fine worn with an open-necked shirt and dark jeans. A dinner jacket & dark jeans? Now that is cool.
Photo credits: Photos in this article are used under the license from Unsplash.
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