A morning coat

Another WG Jennings creation, made for my grandfather in the early 1950s.  

My father (who wore it for 30 years before me) said you could always tell who was wearing their own morning coat because it wouldn’t fit; and he enviously spoke of a friend whose hand-me-down coat was ‘green with age’. Ironically, this is in perfect condition, and fits as if it were made for me.  

However, it has a serious downside: it is wildly, Britishly, impractical for summer wear, made of a heavy cloth that could probably stop a bullet. I wore this to a wedding in Burgundy during a July heatwave, and fainted in the front pew before the rest of the congregation had even arrived. My horrified then-girlfriend drove me back to the hotel, where I flopped on the bed for several hours in my underpants, before abandoning the coat in favour of a shabby linen suit for the rest of the day. 

With any luck, if people are still compelled to wear morning coats to weddings when my son is grown-up, it will at least have started to turn green.