Morning dress is the daytime formal dress code, consisting chiefly for men of a morning coat, waistcoat, and striped trousers, and an appropriate dress for women. Men may also wear a popular variant where all parts (morning coat, waistcoat and trousers) are the same colour/material, often grey and usually called 'Morning Grey' to distinguish it; this is only properly appropriate to weddings and races, and is known as a morning suit.
Morning dress is now rarely worn as anything other than formal wear, as a form of Civic Dress e.g. by provincial Mayors (as an alternative to Court Dress), but more generally only for weddings, some official Civic, governmental or Royal functions, social 'Season' events e.g. races such as Royal Ascot, formal lunches (especially those in the City of London institutions notably of the Livery Companies and Guilds) and as uniform at some of Britain's most traditional schools such as Eton.
Famous quotes containing the words morning and/or dress:
“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)