I am rather disappointed in CBS News for taking the claims of Henry Poole and Co. at face value. Although it is perfectly possible that the first dinner jacket was made by them, this is not proven as you state. They have a record of making a blue silk smoking jacket for the Prince of Wales in the 1860s (they have claimed various dates for it), but this was not the first smoking jacket and there is no reason to believe it was what we today call a dinner jacket. In 1885 they did make a "tail-less tailcoat" for their royal client, but by then dinner jackets were not so novel.
Historians of dress and costume see the dinner jacket as evolving slowly from regency roots and becoming recognizable as a distinct form in late-Victorian or Edwardian times. To define the Poole smoking jacket of the 1860s as the first dinner jacket is arbitrary. To assert that it was first because the firm and its records of royal patronage have survived (while many firms of those days have not endured and their records long since been lost) is the kind of anti-reasoning that is poisonous to sober history.
Essentially, the Poole claim is a corporate advertising gimmick for the grand old firm. It appeals to the desire of people to associate with the pageantry and traditions of past nobility. (How many apartment buildings or consumer products have been given names evocative of royalty for this very reason?) But it is a shame to see a responsible news organization promote such self-interested corporate myth at the expense of true history.
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Historians of dress and costume see the dinner jacket as evolving slowly from regency roots and becoming recognizable as a distinct form in late-Victorian or Edwardian times. To define the Poole smoking jacket of the 1860s as the first dinner jacket is arbitrary. To assert that it was first because the firm and its records of royal patronage have survived (while many firms of those days have not endured and their records long since been lost) is the kind of anti-reasoning that is poisonous to sober history.
Essentially, the Poole claim is a corporate advertising gimmick for the grand old firm. It appeals to the desire of people to associate with the pageantry and traditions of past nobility. (How many apartment buildings or consumer products have been given names evocative of royalty for this very reason?) But it is a shame to see a responsible news organization promote such self-interested corporate myth at the expense of true history.