DIY Formal Jacket

[Zardoz]

About a year ago I picked up two nice pre-owned tailcoats from a reseller with plans to do a formal kilt jacket conversion. I didn't have a solid idea about what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want it to look just like a PC as far as the details.
I kicked around a few ideas for quite a while, and a couple of the Girltourage did up the first version (1.0) for me just in time for this year's mardi gras party back in Feburary;


Here we are at the party; about the best photo I got of it before it went in the trash.

It came out OK, but my seamstress friend, (who I won't be too critical of, she worked for free) sort of took my precise pattern for the tails as more of a 'guideline'... and I wasn't totally happy with the result. I was happy with the cuff detail, then I wasn't, then I tried adding buttons to the cuffs, and then after a failed attempt to re-work the tails the whole thing went in the dust bin....

So a few months later, we just finished up Version 2.0, I had the tails done up by the nice Chinese lady at my local tailor shop this time, (30 bucks and she got it perfect) and decided to go with plain one button cuffs this time.


the front,


the back,

While it obviously has the same basic layout as the PC or it's variants, I like that it's more "streamlined", not having as many buttons, the tri-point cuff and tail details, or epaulets.