By Their Suits You Shall Know Them
On New Year’s Day, Tony Jacoy watches the Rose Parade on television, looking for the color.
He’s not interested in flowers, but in the clothes of the organizers. The suits vary from cream to off-white to -- there it is! -- that glorious, pure-as-snow white that makes him stand up and say:
“That’s one of mine!”
All 935 Tournament of Roses volunteers wear a white suit Jan. 1. It is their uniform, a long-standing tradition of the country’s most-watched parade and a challenging niche business for Jacoy’s San Marino menswear store.
America’s other major market for white suits (sorry, you cruise directors and “Saturday Night Fever” fetishists don’t quite provide the volume) is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All members dress in white when they enter a temple. There, the matching white suits represent purity, unity and the equality of all members.
The Rose Parade uses the white suits for strikingly similar reasons. The white suit is, in fact, a rare populist flourish for a rigidly hierarchical organization that can wear its elitism on its sleeve.
The Tournament of Roses adopted the white suit as its uniform in 1932 as a blow to Eastern tradition, which dictated that white never be worn after Labor Day or before Easter, according to a history compiled for the parade’s centennial.
The distinctive color made Tournament of Roses volunteers readily identifiable to parade-goers and Rose Bowl fans who needed directions. It also reinforced a message: that Tournament volunteers should be in the background. If you want color, keep your eyes on the floats.
The suits have been preserved, parade officials say, out of a sense of history and a desire to make all members feel important. In the 2003 parade, Tournament President Gary Thomas, the one volunteer who wears a red coat instead of white, will break with tradition and don a white suit as he rides down Colorado Boulevard with his family.
“I want to make a statement that we value all our volunteers,” Thomas said.
For Tournament members, buying a white suit often takes them to one of two family-owned Southern California clothiers, who can go as far as Georgia and New York in their search for a fabric white enough for the parade. (A few parade volunteers, in a pinch, have bought suits at shops affiliated with the Mormon church.) Fifty suits is a big sales year, and there is little profit and plenty of aggravation in the endeavor.
“They are hard to get. A lot of manufacturers don’t want to make them,” said Peter Kaplan, whose family has owned Academy Award Clothes in downtown Los Angeles for 53 years. “In a factory, you have pieces of thread, other things flying around in the air. It’s easy to damage white. You have to keep a factory perfectly clean.”
Kaplan’s store and Jacoy’s P.M. Jacoy are competitive.
Kaplan says he is larger than Jacoy and can keep more in stock. Jacoy says that his white suits are better-made, with more lining. Each has sought, unsuccessfully, the Holy Grail of the white suit biz, a pure white wool that could be used for suits.
“I went to every mill I could. There’s no such animal,” Jacoy said.
Frosty Foster, a retired Tournament staffer, encouraged Jacoy to provide the white suits after C&R; Clothiers declared bankruptcy more than a decade ago. The supplier before that, a Colorado Boulevard clothing store owned by a Tournament president, went out of business.
The son of a tailor and a seamstress who ran a business in Highland Park, Jacoy studied political science at UCLA and worked in the defense industry before beginning to sell high-end suits out of the back of his car. In 1985, he opened his own store on Mission Street.
When the Tournament called, he began his search for a pure white fabric. He looked first for wool but couldn’t find it. Cotton suits wrinkle too easily, and linen suits are a little bit creamy, not the pure white desired by parade volunteers.
After more than a month, he found a New York supplier who offered him snow white polyester gabardine material on the condition that he buy it in 100-yard rolls, enough for 25 suits. The supplier wanted assurance that he was serious about buying such an unusual color.
He arranged to have the rolls stocked, and the suits were made for a time in the City of Commerce. In recent years, the New York material has been turned into suits by a company in Georgia.
Jacoy stocks the suits in men’s sizes ranging from 36 short to 60 extra long, and women’s sizes from “0 to I’d rather not say.” He encourages members to order several weeks ahead of time. His trusted tailor, Viem Hoang, spends his holidays making last-minute alterations, often taking work home to get it done by Jan. 1.
“There have been some improvements in white suits over the years,” said Mike Riffey, a Jacoy customer who will be Tournament president in 2004. “The suits today come with linings in the pants, with more thickness, so you don’t feel nearly as cold at night as we once did.”
One of Jacoy’s unofficial duties is to help members comply with the Tournament rules on white suits, which fill an eight-page booklet. The suit must be worn with white bucks, white dress shirt, white belt and a red tie. There are dozens of “don’ts.” Don’t use boots or tennis shoes. Don’t wear dark suspenders. Throw out older, yellowing suits.
Even when people ask, Jacoy refuses to make double-breasted suits because the Tournament frowns on it.
“Cuffs are OK, but that’s about it,” he said.
This year, Jacoy raised the price of the suit from $265 to $285. He doesn’t make much money on them, he said, but likes the business “because of the flood of people who come in the door.”
“I’ve made a lot of good clients through the Tournament,” he said.
Inevitably, some volunteers wait until the last minute to pick suits up. If they miss the shop’s operating hours, Jacoy has been known to leave the suits to be picked up from the gas station attendant across the street.
Sometimes, knowing his clientele, customers will ask him for parade gossip. “But my information isn’t that good,” he said. “I’m the tailor, not the barber.”