Tuxedo Park: The Town That Named a Suit

In eighteen eighty-six, tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard the Fourth purchased a vast tract of Ramapo Mountain wilderness in Orange County and carved out a walled private resort for the very wealthy. He called it Tuxedo Park. That same October, at the club's Autumn Ball, a group of young socialites including Griswold Lorillard appeared in short, tailless dinner jackets instead of the traditional long-tailed formal coat. The jackets were dismissed as scandalous, then quickly admired, and eventually adopted across fashionable society.

Because the jacket debuted at Tuxedo Park, it took the town's name. The park itself incorporated as a village in nineteen fifty-two. Tuxedo, by the way, is an Algonquin word, it referred to the wolf clan of the Lenape people who originally inhabited this mountain country. So a garment now worn at black-tie events worldwide carries a word from Lenape into every formal occasion.