Of all the reasons to want to be 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy (played brilliantly by Alec Baldwin), the most compelling comes in episode seven of season one. Put-upon comedy writer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) is further burdened with providing jokes for a speech that she assumes is being given by Donaghy that night; when she learns that the event is not for months yet, she exasperatedly asks him why he’s changing into a tuxedo in his office. “It’s after 6pm,” he replies. “What am I, a farmer?”

Alas, most of us mere mortals don’t get to dinner suit up with anywhere near that regularity. But even if you only wear black tie once in a blue moon, you still need to be a black belt in this fanciest of dress codes. Because chances are the occasion will be seriously special: a wedding, awards do, high-stakes poker game against a terrorist financier with a deranged tear duct. Whatever it is, you’ll want to ace it.

The History Of Black Tie

Eveningwear scholars have traced the origins of black tie attire to when donning tails for dinner was de rigueur. “You were expected to wear such apparel to dine every evening,” explains Simon Cundey, managing director of Henry Poole, the storied Savile Row tailor that invented the dinner jacket. (Cundey is the great-grandson of Poole’s cousin and business partner, also called Simon.) You’d swap your tailcoat for a smoking jacket in order to have a puff in the drawing room, then revert out of respect for the ladies.

In 1865, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, desired a garment to suit the more relaxed environs of Sandringham House, which was “really a sort of getaway castle” in Norfolk, England. “He would often be dining by himself and wanted something a little bit more casual and easier to wear, so he didn’t have to spread his tails every time he sat down,” continues Cundey. “He and Poole came up with the idea of cutting the tails off and lowering the front, making it a ‘dining lounge jacket’.” And “casual” in the same way as a “getaway castle”.