The first tuxedo I ever
acquired was when I was fifteen. Although I was definitely not a member of the
elite upper crust, I was a student at a public high school (Mirabeau Buonaparte
Lamar) at which a considerable number of scions of well-to-do families were
enrolled. It was the custom of these well-heeled young people to honor
themselves from time to time throughout the school year with formal balls,
usually held at the River Oaks Country Club, situated at the opposite end of
the boulevard on which the high school faced.
Consequently, I was
invited to a number of gala events that were several notches above my natural
social station. My mother, a
divorcée struggling to support her aged father, her feckless son, and
herself on a secretary’s salary of $300 per month, soon found it was more
economical to purchase a formal outfit for her social-climbing teenager than to
rent all that gear several times a year.
At a discount clothing
emporium known as SchwoBilt, now no longer with us, we purchased for a
relatively modest sum a black jacket with faux-silk lapels, black trousers with a
silk stripe down each leg, a white formal shirt, a maroon bow-tie and cummerbund (that color was the
fashion then), a pair of cheap mother-of-pearl cufflinks and matching set of
studs. Voilà! I was in high society!
That tuxedo, cheap as it
was, lasted me through graduate school, after which I acquired a new one for my
wedding. During my days at the Society for the Performing Arts, a tux
constituted my ordinary evening workclothes, so I acquired yet another monkey
suit, which has lasted me to this day.
The name tuxedo stems from Tuxedo Park, a summer
resort for the wealthy in upstate New York, where the short black dinner jacket
was first worn by daring young blades around 1886. Known in England as a dinner suit or simply a dinner jacket, the tuxedo coat was a
departure from the long tailcoat that had been customary in formal dress. In
France and most European countries, the tuxedo is known as a smoking, derived from the English smoking jacket, which was the first
manifestation of a short coat for evening wear, introduced by the Prince of
Wales (later King Edward VII).
Tuxedo
is etymologically derived from the Algonquin p’tuck-sepo, which means “crooked river.”
While we're on an etymological kick, I might as well mention that cummerbund has its origin in the Hindi kamarband, derived from Persian kamar ("waist") and band ("something that ties").
The Bard of Buffalo
Bayou often appears in a tuxedo, so that he won't scandalize the neighbors by walking around in his skivvies while his overalls are at the cleaners.
Tuxedoed,
black-tied, cummerbunded,
Too
bad I’m also under-funded.
