In Octopussy, James Bond dresses for a dinner with Kamal Khan in a black notched lapel dinner suit in a wool and mohair blend by Douglas Hayward. One of Kamal Khan’s men fetched it from the closet in Bond’s hotel room, since it was previously seen hanging there between the white dinner jacket and safari jacket. The notched lapel dinner jacket has appeared a few times throughout the Bond series, often in more intimate settings like here. This outfit recalls the notched lapel black dinner suit Sean Connery wears in Goldfinger at a private dinner.
The dinner jacket is a button one, cut with a clean chest and soft shoulders with gently roped sleeve heads. It has jetted pockets, double vents and three-button cuffs. The buttons are made of black horn. The notched lapels are faced in shiny satin silk.
This dinner suit has a very similar appearance to the one that Roger Moore wears two years earlier in For Your Eyes Only, with the biggest difference being the lapel width. The lapels in For Your Eyes Only extend two thirds of the way across to the sleeves whilst the lapels in Octopussy have the classic width of being just a bit more than halfway across.
The dinner suit’s trousers have the same built-in cummerbund waistband that the black trousers worn with the ivory dinner jacket earlier in the film have. The trousers that he wears earlier with the ivory dinner jacket are likely the trousers from this dinner suit. The waistband is very wide and faced in silk, and it extends across the entire front and fastens with two buttons at the right side so the front is unbroken. The trousers have the traditional satin stripe down the outseam of each leg. There are frogmouth pockets just below the waistband. The legs are a medium-width and straight.
Moore wears a cream silk pleat-front dress shirt made by Frank Foster with a spread collar, double cuffs and regular mother of pearl buttons down the placket. Cream is not a traditional colour for a black tie shirt, but it still plenty of contrast with the black dinner suit and is flattering to Moore’s complexion. Cream is the natural colour of silk, and the luxurious shine and soft hand of silk make it an appropriate shirt for black tie. The bow-tie is a classic thistle shape in black satin silk to match the lapels.
This suit was sold at Christie’s on 12 December 2001 for £2,820.
Timelessly elegant. Any idea of the suit’s material, Matt? It appears to have a slight lustre which might suggest an element of mohair in the cloth’s composition.
Perfectly tailored and comfortably worn. Roger’s best dinner suit.
Agreed, this one suits both Moore and Bond…one of the series best, and most unsung.
Roger can make anything look good…I just love his more traditional, and more conservative styled suits from the 1981-1985 era.
One of the finest suits in the entire series.
It’s the outfit most elegant in all “Moore Age”, seems like Connery in “Dr No” or Craig in “Quantum of Solace”!
So im having dinner with the wife at a place where a dress code is enforced (excited these places still exist in California), is it dinner out with the notch lapel? Or should i just stick with the peak?
Double breasted maybe?
Just want to do it right…
Without knowing what the particulars of the restaurant or its rules are, I wouldn’t go for a notch lapel?
Why? Because a black tie dinner is special, as you yourself seems to think so. Would you use an opportunity like this to wear the least formal type of jacket? I would try to make the most of it with something a little more fun, personally!
Beautiful dinner suit, I can’t believe it was sold for such a low price. I am sure a bespoke dinner suit from a Savile Row tailoring house nowadays costs more.