The Bentex Wedding Edit

Grace & Joseph: A Black Tuxedo Wedding

A story in The Bentex Wedding Edit, our real weddings series. Styled to say “I do”.

Four stories into this series and every groom so far has worn colour or texture. Tweed, forest green, a women’s three piece with a sheen. Joseph did the opposite. He married Grace on a Saturday in August at The Garden, The Grounds of Alexandria, and he wore the one thing that never dates: a black tuxedo, cut to him.

A tuxedo is not a black suit

This is the thing we explain most often in the showroom. A black suit and a dinner suit are different garments, and the difference is not the colour.

A tuxedo carries silk. The lapel is faced in satin or grosgrain, the buttons are covered in it, and there is a stripe of it down the outside of each trouser leg. It has no notch lapel in its traditional form, only a shawl or a peak. It closes with one button. It is worn with a dress shirt rather than a business shirt, and it is finished with a bow tie rather than a long tie. Every one of those rules exists because a dinner suit is evening clothing, built to look right under artificial light rather than daylight. That is why a black suit worn to a black tie wedding always reads as a near miss, and why a proper tuxedo does not.

Joseph’s is the traditional version. A shawl lapel, one button, satin-faced, and a white marcella dress shirt with a bib front and black studs down it instead of buttons. A self-tie black bow. A single white bloom at the lapel. Nothing else. Black tie is a short list of rules, and the reward for following it is that you cannot look overdressed.

The cloth is Italian, from Stylbiella, a house that works only in made to measure. You will not find it on a rail in your size, which is the other half of why a dinner suit like this one has to be built rather than bought.

The waistcoat is the part most people skip

Under the jacket he wore a black evening waistcoat, cut low with a deep U front so the shirt studs and the bow tie stay visible above it. It is the piece almost every groom leaves out, and it is the one we most often recommend.

Here is why. A tuxedo jacket comes off at some point in the night. It always does. The moment it does, a groom in a two piece is a man in a white shirt and black trousers. A groom in a three piece is still dressed. The waistcoat holds the line of the body, it keeps the shirt flat, and it turns the second half of the night into a different look rather than a lesser one.

Halfway through their reception, the jacket came off and Joseph danced through dry ice in the waistcoat and rolled cuffs. It is the best-dressed he looked all day, and that only works because the third piece was there.

The Garden after dark

The Grounds is a room that rewards black. The Garden’s canopy is a tangle of ferns and trailing white orchids threaded with fairy lights, a chandelier hangs over the dance floor, and the whole space glows warm and green once the sun goes. Grace wore a strapless ivory lace ballgown with a long train, then changed into a white ruffled gown for the cake, and the bridesmaids stood in olive and sage. Against all of that green and gold, a black dinner suit is the only thing in the frame that does not compete. It just anchors it.

They started the afternoon in a paperbark grove, walked in under the red neon Garden sign, poured a champagne tower under the ferns, and finished on a dance floor full of smoke. Black tie earned its keep from the first frame to the last.

Getting married in black tie?

If your invitation says black tie, the answer is a dinner suit made for you, not a black suit borrowed from the office. Come and see the cloth: we will show you satin against grosgrain, shawl against peak, and talk you through whether the waistcoat is worth it for your night. We cut wedding suits and tuxedos in our Sydney CBD and Castle Hill showrooms, and the fitting is free.

For the opposite approach, see Julie and Sven’s white tuxedo wedding, where the groom wore ivory and kept his groomsmen in black.

Thank you to Grace and Joseph for letting us share their day. Wedding held at The Garden, The Grounds of Alexandria. Photography by Salt Atelier Wedding Photography.