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:
“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I know you not, this room never,
the swollen dress I wear,
nor the anonymous spoons that free me,
nor this calendar nor the pulse we pare and cover.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)