Suit yourself? Too expensive.

From early on we knew we wanted the guys to wear suits in the wedding.  Since we are keeping things slightly casual, we thought tuxes would clash a little too much.  So we had decided: charcoal gray suits.  

But suits are expensive!  We felt terrible asking friends to spend $300 or more on a suit that they may not ever wear again.  And we couldn't ask the guys to just wear a suit of their own because some do not even own suits at this point.  Now, I know that this is a little ridiculous considering women spend hundreds of dollars on BM dresses and rarely wear those again. But I think most of my friends have done a good job of choosing an affordable dress, and some of them I will [hopefully] wear again.

Well, apparently there are no suit rentals in Chicago.  Now, I didn't go out of my way to search for vendors but I was told that no one rented suits.  And when I did a Google search the only results were for tux rental companies.  So we did what we had to and picked out the most basic tux you could find.

We headed over to Men's Warehouse the other night and made our reservations.  Joe wears suits everyday for work, so he knew what he was looking for.  Unfortunately the only color options were black, white, and light gray.  So we opted for black.  I think it will look really nice with the navy blue BM dresses and really, why would we choose white?  Light gray is great if it were a summer or daytime wedding, but for an October afternoon not so much.

(source: finetuxedos.com, After Six tuxedo)

The tux really looks like a suit.  The only difference is that there is a shiny stripe that runs down the sides of the pants, but I don't think it is very noticeable.  I could barely tell it was there.  

The cost of renting the tux was $125 and that included:

• Tux (jacket and pants)
• Shirt
• Shoes
• Tie and vest

We want to provide the ties for all the guys ourselves, so we wanted to opt out of that.  And the vest.  And the shoes.  Because really?  I'm sure all guys have black shoes to wear with a suit.  The girl helping us told us this would only save us (really the groomsmen) a few dollars but we stuck to our guns.  Turns out the cost went down to $87!  That's a big savings!  And Joe got his tux for free, so that's a big bonus for us.  

It feels so great to check another thing off the to-do list!