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What actually counts as a night out outfit these days? Depends entirely on the night, but the honest answer is a shirt or top with a bit more going on than your work clothes, trousers that aren't jeans you've had since college, and shoes that look like you thought about it for more than thirty seconds. That's the whole brief.
Colour is where most men get it wrong, usually by going too far the other way from their everyday grey and navy and ending up looking like they're auditioning for something. Dark colours are easiest to live with, a bottle green or a deep burgundy or a proper black, because they work under bad pub lighting and good bar lighting and they don't date the way a bright print does after you've worn it four times. A patterned shirt is fine but keep the rest of the outfit quiet around it, one loud piece per outfit is the rule I've learned the hard way. Cheap versions of all this tend to come in colours that look right on a screen and slightly wrong in person, a green that's actually more of a khaki, a burgundy that reads maroon under certain lights. A good one has been dyed properly and it shows the moment you're stood next to someone in the cheap version.
How this stuff wears depends enormously on what you spent, which sounds obvious but isn't, because a lot of going out clothing is designed to look fine for one night and then quietly fall apart, which is sometimes exactly what you want if it's a one off thing for a stag do. But if you're buying this to actually wear regularly, the difference shows up in the wash. A cheap shirt goes thin and slightly see through after a dozen washes and the collar starts curling at the points. A well made one holds its shape, the buttons don't loosen, and it still looks sharp after you've worn it to things you'd rather forget. Wash on a cooler setting than the tag suggests if you want it to last, and let shirts and trousers air dry rather than tumble, heat is what kills the finish on most of this. The occasions are fairly broad, anything from a birthday meal to a proper late one, and the same outfit shifted slightly, swap the shoes, lose the jacket, works across most of the year rather than being a specific summer or winter thing.
The detail that makes a good one worth having is simple: you stop thinking about it after the first hour, which is more than you can say for most going out clothes.
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