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

Last week in this series, James wore a double breasted dinner jacket and dressed his groomsmen in black tie to match. Maurice did it differently. He married Zoe on a Saturday in September in a black shawl collar tuxedo, and his groomsmen stood beside him in black suits and long black ties.

It is one of the most common questions we hear from grooms: if I wear a tuxedo, do my groomsmen have to? They don’t, and this wedding shows how to make the split look planned.

Same colour, different garment

From across a room, a tuxedo and a black suit look alike. Up close, three things tell them apart: the lapel, the tie and the shirt.

A tuxedo lapel is faced in satin, so it catches the light. A suit lapel is the same wool as the rest of the jacket. A tuxedo takes a bow tie and a dress shirt. A suit takes a long tie and an ordinary shirt. Keep everything else the same, the black cloth, the black shoes, the white shirts, and the party reads as one group with the groom a step more formal than everyone else.

That was the plan here. Every man wore black. Only Maurice had satin on his lapel and a bow tie at his collar.

The groom’s tuxedo

Maurice’s jacket has a shawl collar, the rounded lapel with no notch or point, faced in black satin. It closes with a single button and has jetted pockets with no flaps, which keeps the front clean. Under it he wore a white dress shirt and a black bow tie, with a white calla lily at the lapel.

A shawl collar is the softest of the three lapel shapes. Joseph wore one earlier in this series; James went the other way with a peak lapel. On a groom standing next to men in notch lapel suits, the shawl does a useful job: its curved line is nothing like the groomsmen’s lapels, so he stands out in the group photographs even when everyone is in black.

Why the groomsmen wore suits

We made the groomsmen’s suits as well as Maurice’s tuxedo, so the black matched across the whole line. Putting groomsmen in suits instead of tuxedos is not a compromise. It has three real advantages.

It sets the groom apart without a second colour. Many grooms want to look different from their groomsmen but don’t want to wear ivory or navy. Satin and a bow tie do it in black.

The suits get worn again. A black suit goes to the next wedding, a formal dinner, or the office. A tuxedo only goes to black tie. For groomsmen paying for their own outfits, that matters.

It holds together with small repeated details. Here the groomsmen wore white calla lilies, the same flower as the groom’s buttonhole and the bridesmaids’ bouquets. The bridesmaids wore chocolate brown satin, the only colour in the party, and the lilies tied every group photograph together.

We also dressed the junior groomsman, in a small black tuxedo with a bow tie. He matched the groom rather than the older groomsmen, which is a nice touch for a younger member of the party: it makes him part of the groom’s own look, and he stands out in the photographs as much as anyone.

From the church to Novella on the Park

Zoe and Maurice married in church in the early afternoon. Zoe wore a beaded ballgown and a long veil edged in lace, and carried a trailing bouquet of white calla lilies and hanging greenery.

The wedding party went on to a sandstone building with two storeys of white verandahs for portraits: the whole party lined up under the columns, the couple alone in an arched timber doorway, then out on the lawn in the late sun.

The reception was at Novella on the Park in Abbotsbury, in the Western Sydney Parklands. They made their entrance through velvet curtains with a champagne coupe each, cut the cake between sparklers, and had their first dance in low fog under a gold chandelier. A tuxedo was the right call for a room like that, and the black suits beside it still looked sharp at the end of a long night.

Planning a tuxedo for the groom and suits for the groomsmen?

Settle two things early: the shade of black, so every jacket matches in daylight photographs, and the flower or accessory the whole party will share. Then decide who wears satin. The black tie details are all in our guide to what to wear to a black tie wedding.

Come and see the cloth in our Sydney CBD or Castle Hill showroom. We make tuxedos for grooms, wedding suits for the whole party, and black suits your groomsmen will keep wearing to work. The fitting is free.

Thank you to Zoe and Maurice for letting us share their day. Reception at Novella on the Park, Abbotsbury. Photography by In Romance (formerly Salt Atelier).

Next in this series: Laura and Tullia, two brides in white and a three piece bridal suit.