Morning Dress – What Customers Are Choosing This Season

Morning dress has been the one of the most regular conversations at 32 Old Burlington Street this spring. Royal Ascot is not far off; weddings have been steady since Easter; and the front shop sees a quiet succession of customers, new and longstanding, who arrive with a date in mind and questions about morning dress.

The pattern emerges over a number of conversations rather than in a single appointment. A customer arrives, the bunches come down from their shelves, the morning suit is talked through. Sitting at the front desk, one starts to notice the season’s most popular choices.

There are really two principal routes a customer takes when ordering morning dress. The first, and the more traditional, is the black morning coat worn with grey-and-black striped trousers and a contrasting waistcoat. The second is the all-grey sharkskin: morning coat, waistcoat and trousers cut from the same cloth, creating a single, quietly unified suit and silhouette. The black coat remains the more versatile of the two — equally at home at a wedding and at Ascot — while the all-grey sharkskin tends to be associated with weddings specifically, where the customer wants the trousers, coat and waistcoat to belong, visibly, to one another.

A number of customers this season have mentioned His Majesty King Charles III. His Majesty’s morning dress has influenced several of the more subtle details that are being asked for. The first is the white Marcella cotton slip, or ‘demi’, fitted inside the waistcoat so that only a narrow border of white is visible at the opening. The effect is quietly traditional — a small line that frames the shirt front without drawing attention to itself. The second is fine corded silk edging around the fronts and lapels of the morning coat. It is an understated finish, the sort of detail one is more likely to feel than to see at first glance, and the customers who admire His Majesty’s style are increasingly asking for it.

Cloth choice has settled comfortably on texture rather than pattern. Fine herringbones are the most requested, with plain herringbones and understated twills not far behind. Shadow stripes are reliably popular and sit very well with either route. Pinstripes, on the other hand, are largely avoided — they tend to read as business rather than formal, and the customer wanting morning dress is, by definition, after something else.

One combination, in the end, has come up more often than any other. A black morning coat. Grey-and-black striped trousers. A buff or dove-grey waistcoat, often double-breasted with a shawl collar. Marcella slips inside the waistcoat. A fine corded silk edging at the fronts and lapels of the coat. It is, in its way, an almost exact transcription of what has been made at the firm for many decades.

The change in morning dress this season, if it is a change at all, is really a refinement. Customers continue to be drawn to the traditions of the suit, and the conversations on the shop floor are less about reinvention than about how the cloth, the waistcoat colour, the silhouette and the small but considered details — the slips, the silk edging, the chosen lapel — arrive, in the end, at one particular morning suit for one particular wedding or one particular morning at Ascot.

It is, as ever, a quiet kind of choosing.