What should a groom wear to a town hall wedding?
Certain weddings follow a standard script. Church wedding in a quaint village: the groom and his groomsmen in morning dress. The bride in a big white dress and veil. A marquee in the grounds of a manor house.
The vibe is classic and traditional -- an emulation of the template set by the English establishment of yore. It conjures double-barreled last names, public schools, and reproofed Barbours arranged by size in the boot room. That the illusion has to be dismantled by midnight is beside the point.
Other weddings are less obvious: a town hall, a registry office. Some grooms choose to wear morning dress to their town hall wedding and look like Ascot racegoers making a detour.
Others default to the business suit: navy, notch lapel, two buttons. Against the portico and its scuffed access ramp, on the most important day of his life, he looks like he's there on municipal business.
Registry office wedding groom suit options and what they each communicate
Morning dress - racegoer renewing his driving licence
Standard corporate suit in navy - public defender on a lunch break
Standard corporate suit in the same grey as a Bisley filing cabinet, hands clasped in the fig leaf position while reciting his vows - guilty defendant
Black tie at 3pm - maître d' on a cigarette break
Tweed, check, or country-style suit - eccentric NIMBY in town to protest a new development
Colorful or patterned suit - children's entertainer
The ideal suit for a town hall wedding
A suit worn by the groom to a town hall wedding has to opt out of the workaday.
Look again at the list above and one thing recurs: the lapel. For more than a century, it has followed men into interviews, boardrooms, and courtrooms, absorbing connotations of work along the way. Set against civic granite, it doesn't say ceremony. It says paperwork.
A stand collar, or Nehru collar, removes the lapel. But make it too structured and it suggests a different kind of uniform: that of the hotel bellboy or Bond villain.
The ideal suit, then, is one that closes cleanly at the neck without a tie. It is unstructured and realized in Irish linen, whose creases and asperities introduce something human into the impersonal syntax of civic architecture. Navy for the gravity the day still requires.
It is the suit for the moment when, in the Westminster Room on a bright afternoon in March, before the registrar and thirty people gone quiet behind him, he says: "I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul" -- and the suit he's wearing doesn't argue.
