A client buying flannels last week mentioned, almost on his way out, that he had tickets to the OSM this month. Then came the real question, delivered sideways, the way men ask things they suspect have gone out of fashion: do people still dress for it? If you have been wondering what to wear to the symphony — or whether anyone bothers anymore — the answer from our counter is this: nobody will stop you at the doors of Place des Arts in jeans and a parka. Half the hall proves it every night. The better question is not whether you must. It is whether you should. We think you should, and not for the reason you might expect.
The dress code is gone. The occasion is not.
The obligation disappeared a generation ago, and we do not mourn it; obligation never produced a well-dressed man anyway. What is left is better. When nobody has to dress, the man who does is no longer complying — he is participating. Consider where you are going: a room built so that a hundred musicians, who rehearsed for weeks and dressed for the evening themselves, can play without a single wire or speaker. Everything about the night is deliberate. Arriving in the fleece you wore to the hardware store is not a crime. It is simply a refusal of an invitation that was, in fact, extended.
And here is the part nobody tells you: the concert itself barely sees your clothes. The lights go down, and for two hours your jacket is invisible to everyone, including you. Where an outfit actually lives is the lobby, the staircase, the intermission — twenty-odd minutes of standing in good light with a small drink and the person you came with. Dress for the intermission. It is the best-lit room you will stand in all week.
What to wear to the symphony: the working formula
A dark, textured sport jacket. A fine dark knit or a proper open collar. Gray flannel trousers. Dark shoes with an actual shine. No tie is required, and no tie is wrong — this is one of the few evenings left in this city where either answer is fully correct.
The jacket we keep steering concert-goers toward this season is Luigi Bianchi’s dusty mauve Prince-of-Wales sport jacket ($1,725). Italian virgin wool, a Glen check in muted mauve, plum and dark brown, patch pockets, and a soft Dream-fit shoulder. From across the foyer it reads as a quiet, grayish jacket behaving itself. At arm’s length — which is where intermission happens — the check resolves, and the colour turns out to be the most interesting thing in the room that is not holding an instrument. One deep piece, everything else quiet: the rule we gave you in October works nowhere better than under a chandelier.
Underneath, skip the shirt debate entirely. A fine-gauge mock neck zipped to the collarbone frames the face the way a collar does and asks nothing of a tie. Patrick Assaraf’s noir mélange extra-fine merino quarter-zip ($265) is the one we would put under that mauve check — nearly black, slightly smoky, deliberately quiet so the jacket can speak. The fine gauge matters for a second reason: concert halls are kept warm, and the man in a chunky sweater at row G spends the second movement thinking about the wrong things.
The parka problem, and other Montreal practicalities
November is the catch. You leave the house at seven into sleet, and the temptation is to zip the parka over everything and accept your fate. Resist it. Wear the overcoat over the jacket if you own one, and either way, use the coat check — it exists precisely so that a down coat does not spend an entire symphony folded in your lap.
The city has also quietly solved the salt problem for you. Place des Arts connects underground to the métro and parks cars beneath the hall, which means polished calfskin can travel from your front door to row G without once meeting the slush on Sainte-Catherine. If you are walking any real distance, wear the commute shoe and let the good pair ride in a bag — the same trick we recommend for the office works just as well at eight on a Saturday night.
Two caveats, because we owe you those. A weekday matinee, a casual series, a student concert: dress down accordingly, and dark jeans under the jacket are fine there, under the usual rules — dark, uniform, nothing distressed. And if the only thing standing between you and Thursday is a jacket sleeve that has needed a half-inch since August, that is a visit our tailors can turn around in days this month. Book a fitting, or bring the jacket by the store on Decarie this week.
The hall dims, the oboe hands out its A, and for the next two hours every detail on that stage will be exactly where it should be. There is no reason the man in seat C14 cannot say the same.
