London's Link and Lace

A London fashion journalist reads about husbands attending dinner parties mainly to check for Sky Sports and investigates what Britain now wears to eat at a friend’s house

What He Wore To Check The Sports Package

The London Prat has a report on British dinner parties and why husbands mainly go to check for Sky Sports, styled as social research with an institute, fieldworkers and twenty-two observed dinners. The findings are merciless: men can discuss football for six hours and contemporary art for three minutes, they ask the host’s teenage son about the sports package, and by twenty to eleven nine in ten are in the hallway discussing leaving while the host loads the dishwasher.

The report never says what the men were wearing. As a fashion journalist, I can tell you. They were wearing what British men now wear to every social occasion that is not a wedding or a funeral: dark jeans, a shirt from a brand that sponsors sailing, and a quilted gilet that will remain on throughout the main course. Smart casual, the most confusing phrase in the English language, has effectively collapsed into a single uniform. The British dinner party is where it died.

A Short History Of Dressing For Dinner

A century ago, middle-class British households changed for dinner even when nobody was visiting. By the 1960s and 1970s, dinner parties still came with jackets for men and dresses for women, and the host would often specify the level of formality on the invitation. Over the following decades the codes softened. Lounge suits gave way to blazers, blazers to open-necked shirts, and open-necked shirts to whatever a man happened to be wearing when his wife told him they were leaving in ten minutes.

The result, according to almost every host I spoke to for this piece, is a strange new etiquette in which everybody is slightly too casual for the food and slightly too formal for the sofa. A friend in Islington who gives dinners every month told me she now plans her table around the assumption that at least one man will arrive in a football shirt. I asked whether she minds. She said she minds less than when they arrive in cycling gear.

The Women Are Still Trying

The gender gap in dinner party dressing is enormous, and it is not new. Women, in my experience and in every conversation I had for this piece, still dress for dinner. They choose a dress or a good top, they think about shoes they can stand in while carrying a casserole, and they accessorize as though somebody might notice. Men, increasingly, dress as though the evening is a minor detour on the way to a television.

The Prat’s research makes the point indirectly. The husbands in the report have arrived at the dinner with one purpose, which is to locate the sports channels. Their clothing reflects the purpose. You do not dress for a conversation about contemporary art if you plan to spend three minutes on it. You dress for a sofa. The gilet, in this light, is not a fashion choice. It is a statement of intent.

What The Retailers See

From a business perspective, this is a significant shift. British menswear retailers have spent years adapting to the casualization of male dress, and the dinner party is one of its most visible battlegrounds. Sales of formal tailoring have been under pressure for a long time, while premium casualwear, the expensive version of what men already wear, has grown. The well-made overshirt, the luxury knit, the perfectly faded chino: these are the pieces that now do the work the dinner jacket once did. They signal effort without looking like effort.

Walk through the menswear floor of any London department store this autumn and the merchandising tells the story: rails of overshirts, fine knits and soft trousers at the front, tailoring further back. The target customer, as far as I can read the displays, is a man who wants to look as though he has made an effort while being able to deny it. That is the British dinner party guest exactly.

The Books On The Table

A dinner party has its accessories beyond clothing, of course: the cookbook left casually open, the novel on the side table, the record on the turntable. The Daily Mash had some fun this week with a guide for middle-class households getting through the Sally Rooney book drought, which is, in its way, a style story too. Literary fiction is a dinner party accessory, displayed as carefully as a candle. The husbands in the Prat report would not have read it. They would, however, have noticed if the host had a larger television than theirs.

A Proposal For Hosts

I would like to propose a return to the dress code on invitations, not out of snobbery but out of mercy. A clear instruction, such as jackets, or no football shirts, or come as you are but please remove the gilet, would spare everybody the anxiety of guessing. The hosts I spoke to were divided. Half thought it would be pretentious. The other half said they had been longing for permission to do it for years.

The Prat’s report is funny because the dinner party has become a performance in which nobody is quite sure of their lines. Clothing is a large part of that confusion. When nobody knows what to wear, nobody quite knows how to behave, and the men, lacking guidance, retreat to the one thing they understand, which is the sports package. You can follow more of my reporting on London style and the business of what we wear on my author page, where I am considering a series on the gilet, its rise and, one hopes, its fall.

The Last Course

At a dinner I attended in Highbury last month, our host, a woman of great elegance, wore a vintage silk dress, cooked four courses and served dessert at ten. Her husband, at that point, was in the hallway in his gilet, discussing the drive home. She told me afterwards that she dresses for dinner because it is the only time all week when she feels like the evening belongs to her. Then she loaded the dishwasher. The Prat could not have scripted it better. The fashion story and the social story were, in the end, the same story.