WHERE’S NEXT FOR LUXURY?
In-person and digital tickets
for Walpole members and
non-members available now
Monday 29th April
at The Londoner
Buy tickets here
Black tie dressing for the Walpole Awards with Henry Poole

Celebrating outstanding work in the luxury sector, the 2018 Walpole British Luxury Awards take place on Monday 19th November at The Dorchester, London. Befitting such an illustrious event, and for the first time in its 17-year history, 'black tie' will be de rigueur for this year's Awards. This new dress code is inspired by Walpole member Henry Poole, who created the universal standard for eveningwear in 1865.
24th Jun 2018
Black tie dressing for the Walpole Awards with Henry Poole

In 1865, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, known to his family and intimates as Bertie, asked his tailor and friend Henry Poole to cut a short celestial blue evening coat to be worn at informal dinners at Sandringham. No earlier reference to any similar garment has been found in the historic Henry Poole & Co ledgers, which date back to 1846—or the surviving ledgers of any other tailor or period illustration. This royal evening coat was the blueprint for what we now know in England as the dinner jacket.

The Americans christened the British DJ a tuxedo. The well-known story from the Tuxedo Park Club, north of New York City, offers the theory that a James Brown Potter met the Prince of Wales in 1886. The Prince had a notorious wandering eye, and it fell upon Brown’s devastatingly gorgeous wife, Cora. This frisson of Royal lust led to an invitation to dine and sleep at Sandringham. Potter, not knowing the form for a Royal informal evening, asked his tailor, Henry Poole, what he should wear. Poole answered with no little confidence that a short celestial blue evening coat was appropriate—because he had already made the very thing for the prince to wear at Sandringham.

 

 

The story continues that Potter ordered the short evening coat from Henry Poole and, on his return to the United States, introduced this new dinner jacket to the Tuxedo Club and New York’s fashionable social scene. Unfortunately, due to damage and loss, any record of an American customer named James Potter has disappeared from Henry Poole’s ledgers. However, the founding fathers of the Tuxedo Club, Messers William Waldorf Astor, Robert Goelet, Ogden Mills and Pierre Lorillard, are all well-documented as Poole customers in the 1860s, when Bertie first ordered his prototype dinner jacket. It is therefore more than likely that these social peacocks copied the Prince of Wales and introduced the dinner jacket to New York society (and subsequently the Tuxedo Club) a full twenty years before the apocryphal Potter incident. However it got to America, the tuxedo started at Henry Poole. Today, known by different terms around the world (to Germans, it is a ‘Smoking’), the Henry Poole dinner jacket, in black or midnight blue, remains the universal standard for men’s eveningwear.

Find out more: henrypoole.com

Related Articles

Lauren Dickinson Clarke curates our latest Walpole Weekend Wind-Down playlist
Walpole Weekender
28th Mar 2024
Lauren Dickinson Clarke curates our latest Walpole Weekend Wind-Down playlist
Every month, we ask a different Walpole member or partner organisation to put together a playlist to help you transition into weekend mode after yet another high-stress week at work. For April, scented candle and home accessories brand Lauren Dickinson Clarke has shared a playlist tranquility and enlightenment to the end of your week
David Kendall on being part of the LGBTQ+ community in the luxury sector
Inclusive Luxury
28th Mar 2024
David Kendall on being part of the LGBTQ+ community in the luxury sector
Inclusive Luxury is our content series dedicated to celebrating the work of Walpole member executives in the LGBTQ+ community. In our latest interview, we speak to David Kendall, Marketing and Communications Director at storied interior architecture firm, David Collins Studio
Walpole's Anna Maude shares her Out of Office essentials
Out of Office
22nd Mar 2024
Walpole's Anna Maude shares her Out of Office essentials
In our Out of Office interview series, we speak to Walpole member and partner executives at the top of their game about how they live their lives away from their desks – the habits that help them decompress, the activities that re-centre their minds, and the little luxuries that they can't live without. This week, we talk dog walks, dirty martinis and phone drawers with Walpole's Executive Assistant & Head of Programme, Anna Maude