Spats with black tie?

[Guttersnipe]

Thanks so much for the kind replies. I won't make that mistake, although I still wonder why I see photos of tuxedoes and spats from the '20's.

Do you mean suits like this, a la Hercule Poirot:



As you can see, a suit like that above could very easily be mistaken for a tuxedo, if it were in a dark gray or black cloth -- especially in a black and white picture! This style of suit is not formal wear per se, but rather a very conservative form of daytime dress. When Agatha Christie wrote the first Poirot stories, in she 1910s, she pictured Poirot as an older man already set in his ways. As such, the styles of dress used to costume David Suchet as Poirot is really more of a late nineteenth/very early twentieth century style of dressing.

[DeaconKC]

Egads, he is wearing Patent leather AND spats! And that lovely young hussy will certainly muss his hair!