Dammit Jim!

I just had a nice simple wedding a couple weeks ago (that and the new job is keeping posts even more sparse than usual). We weren’t doing anything big but I thought it’d be cool to dress up, especially since Xiaofen already picked up a wedding dress in China. So I started looking around for tux rentals. Surprisingly (to my uncultured self at least), tuxedos cost $150 to rent and you need to give them several weeks notice. This seemed a bit high so I went home and looked around the internet for typical prices. It turns out tuxedos really do tend to cost $150 to rent. But while googling, I noticed that at least one online store sells complete tuxedo packages for around $300.

Now I don’t mind spending money when I have to but when somebody wants to charge me 50% of the purchase price to borrow something for the day I’m going to draw the line. And get a bit annoyed. So I thought I might as well write it up here and maybe help someone else avoid getting screwed by tuxedo rentals.

I was a little worried there would be some sort of trick to a tuxedo that (relatively) cheap but the tuxedo arrived two days after I ordered it (I’m having amazing luck with shipping recently) and the package really seems to cover everything you need (except shoes and socks); jacket, pants, shirt, vest, bow tie, handkerchief (apparently called a pocket square) and simple cuff and button links. I did need to get the pants hemmed but I guess that’s normal and it was only $8 at a local dry cleaner. I’m no tuxedo expert but it seems to look pretty sharp and feels nice and comfortable.

So if you need a tux, buy4lesstuxedo worked well for me.

Details only interesting to people looking for tuxes: I thought the Geoffrey Beene tuxes looked the best out of all of them (although I wonder how much of that is due to the photography and model choice). I wanted a shawl or peaked collar (I never would have predicted I’d be writing about tuxedo collars on here) but they had a pretty low selection of both in my size. So I ended up getting the 2 button notch collar by Geoffrey Beene.

I couldn’t find any non advertisement pictures on Google so if here is a picture of a Geoffrey Beene 2 button notch tuxedo (and a beautiful bride) for any tuxedo shoppers.