The Oscars shortlist has just been announced. As usual there will be a lot of fuss about what the actresses will be wearing. But there’s a more interesting drama this year — what the actors won’t be.

What some of them — the younger, dressier, edgier nominees and guests — won’t have on is a dinner jacket, a bow-tie, a starched shirt: the ensemble known as a DJ here and a tuxedo over there. They will be in black suits, but there the dress code of the modern male awards-attendee ends.

The prestige of the Oscars may yet save the night for the tux. Perhaps Leonardo Di Caprio’s hand will hover over some silken Comme des Garçons number and he’ll favour something with peaked lapels from Hackett instead. And Peter O’Toole might win the Oscar. Helen Mirren might not. Anything’s possible — just. But the smart money is on the ceremony marking another stage in the 300-year journey towards what learned commentators have called the “ casualisation of menswear”. As for the Baftas — well, we are awfully directional in London. Expect the male contingent in Piccadilly to look more like Saturday night at the 100 Club in 1977 than the Basingstoke Guild of Chartered Surveyors’ annual awards do in 2007. There will be black suits and skinny black ties, winklepickers and tousled hair. There won’t be many cummerbunds. Mr Moss and his Bros will wince and cross their fingers and hope weddings don’t go the same way.

The actors (and musicians, and comedians, and media boys) who refuse to do the Moss Bros run aren’t doing it because they don’t want to dress up. They want to dress up more — look more distinctive and expensive. For all its posh associations, the DJ is a great leveller, an exercise in sartorial democracy. A Basingstoke chartered surveyor can look more or less the same as the hottest wunderkind in Hollywood. And the identical male evening garb has another, vital quality: we provide a backdrop against which the girls may look gorgeous.

Now the boys want to look gorgeous too. It wasn’t so very different when I was 12 and I went to my first proper evening party at my (mixed) school. It was an evening of Scottish country dancing. One, and only one, “pop song” was allowed: Knock Three Times by Tony Orlando and Dawn. The girls could wear what they liked. The boys had to wear school uniform. We revolted — this was the era of student protest, even if we were 12.

The dispute reached the headmaster, a veteran of the Dam Busters raid who could in no way be described as a prototypical metrosexual. The row was serious enough for him to address the school at assembly. The boys, he announced chillingly, would wear their uniforms. That’s because they would look smart in their black so that the girls could look even more pretty in their dresses.

That was that. And if you ask many girls today they’d say that my headmaster was damn right, too.

Defenders of the DJ needn’t give up yet. Classic evening dress has seen off sterner challenges than a few overpaid wastrels who think wearing white shoes at an awards do is an ideological statement. After all, the DJ defeated Marxism.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the long-ago days when politics mattered, just about everything you did — and certainly everything you wore — was an ideological statement. In the summer of my first year at Cambridge, Elvis Costello played the May ball. He greeted the revellers with a sneering “Hello penguins,” played a very strictly contractual 45 minutes and went off, still sneering.

Too right, said we Marxists. I boycotted the ball. A nice girl had asked me if I was going, which was her way of asking me if I’d ask her to go. I said I couldn’t because I wouldn’t wear a bloody dinner jacket. I also had flared cords and a beard and thought students still held sit-ins.

The nice girl went with someone else. The sit-ins never happened. Eventually, kindly friends told me to burn the cords. A year later, clean-shaven, straight-legged and chastened, I bummed a 1960s vintage mohair shawl-collared dinner suit from a friend of my father and asked another girl to the ball who had asked if I was going.

Only a year had passed, but much had changed. The Thatchers and Reagans were celebrating the inevitable demise of Communism in White House balls. Brideshead Revisited was a weekly social engagement that no one dared miss. ABC’s Look of Love video turned the heads of a generation of young men who thenceforth looked for any opportunity to wander around with foppish hair, dress shirts undone Shelley-like and a bow-tie dangling all distrait below the throat.

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