Morning coat

A tailcoat is a coat with the front of the skirt cut away, so as to leave only the rear section of the skirt, known as the tails. The historical reason coats were cut this way was to make it easier for the wearer to ride a horse, but over the years tailcoats of varying types have evolved into forms of formal dress for both day and evening wear. Although there are several different types of tailcoat, the term tailcoat is popularly taken to be synonymous with the type of dress coat still worn today in the evening with white tie. This dress coat, one of the two main surviving tailcoats, is a dark evening coat with a squarely cut away front. The other one is the morning coat (or cutaway in American English), which is cut away at the front in a gradual taper.

A dress coat, sometimes called a swallow-tail or claw-hammer coat, is the coat that has, since the 1850s, come to be worn only in the evening by men as part of the white tie dress code, also known as evening full dress, for formal evening occasions. It is commonly referred to as just a tailcoat, but amongst tailors (both British and American) and dress historians it is traditionally called a dress coat to differentiate it from other types of tailcoats.

The modern dress coat is an evolution of the coat that was once both day and evening dress. It became increasingly popular from around the late 1790s and was particularly widespread during the British Regency, and in America in the 1830s to 1850s. The eighteenth century dress coat was supplanted in the 1850s as formal day wear by the frock coat, which was in turn replaced in the twentieth century by the morning coat. In the Regency period, the dress coat with gilt buttons was always worn with non-matching trousers, pantaloons or breeches. Since the Victorian era, the modern dress coat for evening wear has been worn with matching trousers of the same cloth with two stripes of braiding down the side. The resulting suit is traditionally referred to by tailors as a dress suit.

A dress coat is waist length in the front and sides, and has two long tails reaching to the knees in back. Sometimes there is a pocket on the inside to hold gloves. Since around the 1840s the dress coat has lacked outside side pockets, but prior to this it took flapped side pockets. Since the early twentieth century it has become acceptable to have a welted pocket on the outside of the chest to hold a pocket square, but prior to this dress coats lacked any outer pockets. The front of the skirt is squarely cut away. Since around the 1830s the coat has been constructed with a waist seam that allows greater waist suppression. From the Victorian era, the revers has taken facings in silk (grosgrain or satin) on the lapels. Although it is double-breasted, since the 1870s, the dress coat no longer fastens in the front. As a result, although there are two rows of buttons, these are all non-functional, serving only a decorative function.

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Wikipedia