In Octopussy, Bond goes to the casino in India wearing a button-one, peak-lapel ivory dinner jacket made by Douglas Hayward. According to the Designing 007 exhibition, the dinner jacket is made of linen, but it looks and performs more like a lightweight plain-weave worsted wool. It could possibly be a linen and wool blend. The costume designer Emma Porteous would likely have chosen a fabric that looks good on screen over what keeps Roger Moore the coolest, though the right kind of wool wears very cool.
The dinner jacket has double vents, jetted pocket and three-button cuffs. The buttons are made of white mother of pearl. The shoulders are narrow, softly padded and have roped sleeve heads. The peak lapels are fairly narrow. The button stance is low but it’s no lower than on Roger Moore’s button two jackets from this era.
The flat front trousers are black with a satin stripe down the straight leg. The trousers also have a sort of waistband that acts like a built-in cummerbund. The waistband is very wide, flat silk that extends across the entire front and fastens with two buttons at the right side.
The shirt made by Frank Foster is white cotton voile, a light-weight fabric that breathes well in hot and humid India. The shirt has a spread collar, placket front and double cuffs with rounded corners. It is well-fitted through the torso with two darts in the lower back to shape the waist. The shirt buttons are mother of pearl and the cufflinks are onyx. When Bond takes off his dinner jacket you may notice that his sleeves seem a bit long and bunch up at the wrist. This extra length isn’t seen when the dinner jacket is on because the cuff is tight enough that it doesn’t slide down the wrist or up the arm. The extra length allows the cuff to stay in place no matter how much the arm moves and bends.
With the dinner jacket and trousers, Bond wears a black satin bow tie and black patent leather slip-on shoes. Bond unfortunately gets a knife stuck in his dinner jacket below the breast-pocket welt, however Q-Branch magically reweaves the large hole so Bond can wear his dinner jacket again for dinner later that evening.
Good choice of blog for the turn of the season, Matt and another example of what I admired about Moore’s portrayal of Bond; style and elegance.
Connery and Moore wore both the full dark dinner suit and the ivory dinner jackets and black trousers version in exotic locations interchangeably.
I made the observation in a reply to one of your previous blogs that we haven’t seen Bond wear an ivory (or “off-white”) dinner jacket since Moore’s swan song, “A View to A Kill” back in 1985 and wondered why this was the case? Certainly, Moore’s immediate successor hadn’t the innate sense of style to pull such a look off successfully but why not Pierce Brosnan? “Goldeneye” and “The World is Not Enough” certainly both had scenes in climates where this could’ve worked.
It’s the same as the blazer discussion which I mentioned before. A blazer, so often a Bond wardrobe staple, last seen on Brosnan in “Goldeneye”, 16 years ago. Ditto, the ivory dinner jacket, 26 years ago. Then again polite dressing, for want of a better description, is waning all the time. Is a black dinner suit seen as the only acceptable choice nowadays, regardless of climate?
In “A View to A Kill” Moore’s ivory dinner jacket has notched lapels. I find the “Octopussy” version more appealing. I actually wore one myself (notched lapels) on my honeymoon in India last year and got some very nice compliments.
I agree, David, Zuchovsky's casino in The World Is Not Enough wouldve been a great place for Brosnan to don an ivory dinner jacket.
He could've gotten away with a white dinner jacket in Monaco in GoldenEye, though Baku in winter doesn't seem like the best place to wear a white dinner jacket. Though it's a dry place, it's not particularly hot. If you want to see Brosnan in a white dinner jacket there are plenty in Remington Steele, and eventually I'll write here about one of those. You can see a white shawl collar dinner jacket in the opening of seasons 3-5. I believe that clip may have been taken from an episode set in the French Riviera.
I'm interested in one aspect of male suiting you mention regularly; the "roped" sleevehead.
Assuming the sleevehead of a jacket is the area where the sleeve meets the body of the jacket at the shoulder, what is "roped" and what other style of sleevehead is commonly seen?
A roped sleevehead is where there is wadding in the top of the sleeve that gives it shape, like there is a rope sewn in. It's typical of British and some Italian suits but rarely found on American suits. It's often called a "roped shoulder" but the shoulder really has nothing to do with it; it's in the sleevehead. Most American and Neapolitan suits have a natural shoulder where the sleeve just hangs without wadding in the top. Some Neapolitan tailors achieve the roped look without any wadding, where the style is called "con rollino."
Thanks for that, Matt.
I’m looking forward to when you cover the safari/hunting/half-Norfolk style sports jacket which Bond wears in The Spy Who Loved Me for the Cairo scenes. This has long been a particular favourite of mine and has many interesting features.
David, that cotton jacket from The Spy Who Loved Me is indeed very interesting. I'm not sure I like it, for reasons I may or not state in the future blog entry, but I'll be sure to write about the outfit. Depending on how warm the weather gets where I am will determine when I write about it. As of now I'm not feeling the Egyptian desert in my New York spring. At the very latest I'll write about this by the end of June.
I like this one. Cool double breasted blazer and cravat on the guy to left, too.
I find these cuffs to be very interesting, if unsightly without the jacket on.
Matt, could you do a writeup on sleeves? How much shirt cuff to show, and a comparison of the different Bonds’ jacket sleeve lengths, overcoat sleeve lengths?
What about the cuffs do you find interesting? They’re ordinary double cuffs.
I wrote about sleeve length a little in my sleeve width article. I did not touch on overcoat sleeve length, which should be the same length as shirt sleeves, or just a hair longer so the shirt cuffs do not show. It would be a little difficult to compare the different Bond’s sleeve lengths since Daniel Craig’s sleeve length are not even consistent between films. The jacket sleeves have gotten shorter with each of his films.
Interesting that Hayward tailored this dinner jacket with padding, be it softly. Usually he just used a little wadding in the shoulder like Anthony Sinclair did. What do you think was the reason for this Matt ?
He probably used just a little more wadding than usual because he wanted to ensure that, being linen, this dinner jacket would look formal enough.
What’s your take on the transparency of the shirt? I was about to wear this shirt to dinner but my date stopped me; she said it was a bit too revealing. Your thoughts?
Along with the linen dinner jacket, voile is a necessity in India’s heat. Voile is often made with a double-layer front to be opaque where it is seen but left more breathable everywhere else, but Frank Foster made this one only a single layer in front for the heat. When you’re wearing a jacket over the shirt, I don’t think the transparency is a problem.
One could always wear a crewneck undershirt, though some would argue it defeats the purpose of voile. But I agree with Matt that it shouldn’t be an issue if the jacket is kept on, which it should be.
The lapels seem lower than what’s in style now, but is this the most timeless position of them? If so, I can’t put my finger on it but something just doesn’t work in the shirt-bowtie combo.
The gorge is lower than what has been fashionable for the past decade, but on this jacket it is timeless. The bow tie looks a bit squished, especially in comparison to the large collar. The bow tie may have been tied shorter like this so it looks more in proportion to the narrow lapels. When you compare the bow tie here to the bow tie with the black dinner suit later in the film, the bow tie is the same width but it was adjusted to be longer there. The lapels on the black dinner jacket are slightly wider, so everything matches. If the bow tie were longer with the ivory dinner jacket it would have looked too large with the narrower lapels. Moore’s face looks best with a larger collar, so ultimately he can’t wear narrow lapels because they look too small in comparison to the collar.
Matt do you think bond has ever worn a bullet proof vest with any of his outfits? Do you also think Bond should Wear a bullet proof vest?
Bond has no worn a bulletproof vest because they are heavy and bulky. It might make sense if Bond is storming a villain’s lair, but generally they wouldn’t work for Bond.
The only times he does, if you consider the video games canon, is in… well… the video games. They basically act as his health meter, it’s primarily a gameplay conceit for him to take a few bullets and keep going.
What might make more sense is something like the Kingsman bulletproof suits (which were almost certainly inspired by the real-life Garrison Bespoke garments). But then, at this point fans would accuse them of ripping off a rival spy series if they did such a thing!