A Ralph Lauren Smoking Jacket
Would you?
Could you?
DARE you?
…Wear a Smoking Jacket?
Nowadays the Smoking Jacket seems to have become nothing more than an ad-campaign-only garment for designers such as TOM FORD or Ralph Lauren. However, we have always felt the smoking jacket was long overdue a return to menswear.
A TOM FORD ad-campaign featuring a Smoking Jacket, in one of its more updated forms
For decades either side of the turn of the early 20th Century, the smoking jacket was possibly one of the most eminently practical items of clothing a man could wear, originally designed to protect his dinner jacket from the penetrating smell of cigarette fumes.
They quickly became fashion items, with society’s well heeled on both sides of the Atlantic, competing to have the most luxurious and awe inspiring Smoking Jacket produced for their next dinner party engagement.
Whilst others may have been content to know this, left it aside, happily putting the Smoking Jacket down to a historical legacy of times gone by, at MilanStyle.co.uk this was not the case. Why, we wondered, had some fashion heavyweight renowned for opulence, such as the late Gianni Versace or Dolce & Gabbana, not resurrected this jacket? We wondered, where would one even find a Smoking Jacket to wear, so beloved of Hugh Hefner and the James Bond villains we have all grown up with?
Our friends at KJ Beckett, specialist in upmarket men’s accessories and located in the historic city of Bath, (a distinctly genteel part of England, for our non-British readers) contacted us after our urgent open plea to the world on Twitter, to remedy the situation and informed us that they were stocking this most iconic of items.
Derek Rose, they informed us, Britain’s most luxurious nightwear and loungewear manufacturers, have taken up the quest to provide this most fabled of menswear garments, one which we had previously thought buried in the dustiest corners of sartorial history, next to spats and walking canes.
The Derek Rose Smoking Jacket in Black Watch Tartan
The Derek Rose Smoking Jacket is in plush 100% wool and in Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) Tartan fabric, a tartan which dates back to 1725 and makes this jacket feel even more timeless and regal. It’s £249 and it’s ‘Made in England’.
How to wear a smoking jacket?
- Well, unless you are Pharrell Williams, it should be worn indoors only.
- It was traditionally worn with formal wear (tuxedo) at parties, for example Christmas or New Year’s (house) parties.
- You do not need to smoke to wear it. If you do smoke, it should be a cigar only and a fine Scotch whisky in the other hand to complete the look.
- When other guests gasp with pleasure ‘Where did you get that?’ you must casually reply, ‘This old thing? It was my grandfather’s…’
- You can of course, simply choose to wear it as a dressing gown.
Buy The Derek Rose Smoking Jacket now.
Shop Derek Rose loungewear and nightwear at MilanStyle.co.uk now.
Visit KJ Beckett.com
