Casablanca: Rick's white dinner jacket, and when you can wear one

Rick Blaine runs a nightclub in a hot city, and he dresses for the heat. When Humphrey Bogart walks through Rick’s Café Américain in a white dinner jacket, the film tells you the climate, the hour and who owns the room before anyone speaks.

Most men who look this jacket up are not film students. They have a black-tie invitation for a July evening, a black tuxedo that will be miserable in the humidity, and one worry: that a white jacket will make them look like they are carrying the drinks. It can. What separates Rick from the staff comes down to a handful of details, and every one of them is on screen.

What exactly is Rick wearing?

BAMF Style’s account of the jacket is the most thorough:

• A summer-weight worsted in ivory, an off-white rather than a laundry white.
• Double-breasted, four buttons with one to fasten, which gives a long, low opening.
• A wide shawl collar faced in the jacket’s own cloth. There is no silk on the lapels and none on the buttons.
• A ventless back, jetted hip pockets, and a white silk square in the breast pocket.

Below it: black evening trousers with a black satin stripe down each leg, a white shirt with a long point collar and double cuffs, a small black bow tie, and black patent shoes.

Why does it read as black tie and not as a waiter’s jacket?

Because only one thing in the outfit is light. A white jacket turns into a uniform when it brings company: matching white trousers, a coloured bow tie, a boxy cut, a cloth with a plastic shine. Rick’s jacket has none of them. The trousers are black and formal, the bow tie is black, and the jacket is shaped to him, so the eye reads a dinner jacket in a summer colour.

The detail most copies miss is the lapel. On a black dinner jacket the lapels are faced in satin. On Rick’s ivory jacket they are faced in the same cloth as the body, which is the traditional way to make a warm-weather dinner jacket, and the shine moves down to the stripe on the black trousers. Matte above, a little sheen below. Some makers do face ivory lapels in silk, and it can be done well, but it is the riskier choice: shiny lapels on a pale jacket are the first step toward costume.

When is a white dinner jacket the right call?

The rule is old and still holds. A white dinner jacket is warm-weather black tie, and it needs three things together:

1. A black-tie or black-tie-optional dress code. At a cocktail or semi-formal event, a dinner jacket of any colour overdresses you.
2. Evening. Black tie is evening dress. At a daytime ceremony it is out of place in any colour.
3. Warm weather. In Toronto that means roughly June to early September, and it makes the most sense outdoors: a tent, a garden, a terrace, a lakeside evening, a cruise, a destination wedding somewhere hot.

Out of season it looks lost. Many of Toronto’s black-tie nights are galas in the colder months, in ballrooms, and those want black or midnight; black tie in Toronto this season covers that calendar.

Can a guest wear one to a wedding, or will he look like the groom?

This is the fear behind most of these searches, and it is fair. A guest in ivory is correct at a summer black-tie wedding. The trouble starts only when the wedding party is also in ivory: then you look like a groomsman who lost his boutonnière. Ask the couple, or anyone standing up with them, what the groom and his men are wearing. If they are in ivory, wear black or midnight. If they are in black, the ivory jacket is fine, and you will be one of the few comfortable men in the tent.

If you are the groom, an ivory jacket is one of the cleanest ways to stand apart from groomsmen in black; setting the groom apart has the other options.

How should it fit, and what should change for 2026?

• Fit it with the button done. Pale cloth shows every strain. A button pulling across the stomach makes an X of creases that a black jacket hides and an ivory one puts on display. Settle it at the fitting, sitting down as well as standing.
• Double-breasted is optional. Rick’s four-on-one is a big look. A single-breasted, one-button shawl carries the same idea with less cloth across the front, and it is easier if you will spend the evening seated or unbuttoned. Double-breasted suits explains the button layouts.
• Choose the cloth for July. A light wool, or a wool and silk, breathes and holds its colour far better than a synthetic ivory. Linen creases within an hour, which is fine on a patio and less fine at a head table. Keep the lining light.
• Keep everything else black. Black trousers with a stripe, a black self-tie bow tie, black shoes. The jacket is the one light note.
• Plan for marks. Ivory shows wine, lipstick and the arm of a chair. Blot a spill at once; care by cloth covers what goes out and when.

How far ahead should you order?

Sam makes dinner jackets and tuxedos to your measurements, taken at the Vaughan studio or at your office or home on request, in three to four weeks with one fitting on the finished jacket. For a wedding, two to three months ahead is comfortable. Orders placed between November 20 and the end of February take about three weeks longer, so for a June wedding, start in early spring rather than in May.

The fabric library lists an ivory dinner-jacket cloth to start from. Sketch Rick’s jacket as a double-breasted shawl with a bow tie: draw the Casablanca jacket. The Drawing Board draws matching trousers; Rick’s were black, and yours should be too. Then book a time and bring the invitation, because its wording decides ivory or midnight before any cloth comes out.

Where the details come from: BAMF Style and Black Lapel.