Person In Tuxedo Emoji

A person in a black tuxedo with a bow tie. The default sense is formalwear: weddings, prom, galas, black-tie dinners. The emoji also carries a running James Bond reference thanks to Sean Connery's 1962 'Bond, James Bond' moment in Dr. No, which made the tuxedo globally synonymous with suave, slightly dangerous sophistication.

🤵 was approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as MAN IN TUXEDO, part of the same catch-up batch that gave us 🤴 prince and 🤰 pregnant person. In Emoji 13.0 (2020) Unicode renamed it PERSON IN TUXEDO and added the ZWJ variants 🤵‍♂️ man in tuxedo and 🤵‍♀️ woman in tuxedo, part of the same release that added 👰‍♂️ man with veil and gender-neutral Santa 🧑‍🎄. The 2020 change was explicitly about opening up wedding emoji to any combination (two tuxedos, two veils, one of each) and was praised by Stonewall as 'a welcome step' for LGBTQ+ representation.

Where 🤴 means 'royal' and 💂 means 'British,' 🤵 means 'formal occasion.' It's the most event-coded emoji in the Person-Role family: if you see 🤵 in a message, there's almost certainly a wedding, gala, prom, or black-tie dinner attached.

🤵 peaks in three predictable seasonal windows: prom season (April-May in the US), wedding season (June-September), and awards season (January-March). Instagram and TikTok posts about getting ready for any of these rely on 🤵 as the event marker.

Outside those windows, 🤵 does three other jobs. First, James Bond shorthand: the tuxedo + 🔫 combo instantly reads as 007 reference. Second, suave/dressed-up humour: 'I wore real pants today 🤵' is the standard overkill-joke template. Third, wedding-emoji iconography: 🤵👰, 🤵🤵, 🤵‍♀️🤵‍♀️, and 🤵👰‍♂️ are all valid wedding combos since 2020, and queer couples have leaned into the flexibility that old-school 'groom + bride' defaults never allowed.

The women-in-tuxedos angle has a long pre-emoji history. Marlene Dietrich wore one in 1930's Morocco. Janelle Monáe has built an entire aesthetic around it. Billy Porter's 2019 Oscars tuxedo-gown made red-carpet news. 🤵‍♀️ finally lets emoji catch up to what fashion normalised decades ago.

Flirty-adjacent rather than flirty. 🤵 signals elevation: someone has made an effort, is standing in a nice room, is about to toast or propose. Paired with 😏 💋 or 💘 it reads as flirtation wrapped in sophistication. Paired with 🥂 or 🍾 it's celebration. Paired with 🔫 it's full James Bond cosplay, which is its own kind of flirting.

• •🤵😏 = 'I clean up well' flex
• •🤵💋 = date-night or proposal energy
• •🤵🍾 = celebration, toast, we made it
• •🤵🔫 = deliberate Bond reference, usually knowing and a little tongue in cheek
• •🤵💍 = proposal announcement or imminent engagement

The tuxedo itself is an American invention from 1886, which is young for a 'classic' garment. Tuxedo Park, New York was a gated hunting and fishing retreat built by tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV, about an hour north of Manhattan. In the summer of 1886, club member James Brown Potter travelled to England and spent a weekend at Sandringham with Edward, Prince of Wales. The prince was wearing a short black dinner jacket instead of the formal tailcoat typical of the era. Potter brought the jacket style home to Tuxedo Park. Other members had their tailors copy it.

The name comes from a specific night at Delmonico's in New York. A group of Tuxedo Park members wore the new jacket to a bachelor dinner. Other diners asked what it was. 'Oh, that's what they wear for dinner up at Tuxedo.' The name stuck. Every 🤵 keyboard tap is named after a private club in Orange County, New York.

Seventy-six years later, Dr. No (1962) opened with Sean Connery in a midnight-blue Anthony Sinclair dinner suit at the baccarat table, saying 'Bond, James Bond.' That single scene globalised the tuxedo as spy-chic. Every subsequent Bond, every parody, every casino sequence, every 'agent with gadgets' trope runs through those 30 seconds. When you send 🤵🔫 in 2026, you're compressing a James Potter weekend in 1886 and a Sean Connery take in 1962 into one character.

The 2020 Unicode expansion added the third layer. Emoji 13.0 renamed the base character PERSON IN TUXEDO and shipped 🤵‍♀️ woman in tuxedo, 👰‍♂️ man with veil, and gender-neutral Santa. The Unicode motivation was explicitly inclusion: any wedding combination should be representable. Stonewall praised it; fashion had been there for decades, from Marlene Dietrich in 1930's Morocco to Janelle Monáe's black-and-white suiting to Billy Porter's 2019 Oscars tuxedo-gown by Christian Siriano.

Approved in Unicode 9.0 (June 2016) as U+1F935U+1F935 MAN IN TUXEDO, from the same catch-up proposal that added 🤴 prince and 🤰 pregnant person. Renamed PERSON IN TUXEDO in Emoji 13.0 (2020). The ZWJ sequences 🤵‍♂️ (U+1F935 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0FU+1F935 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F) and 🤵‍♀️ (U+1F935 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0FU+1F935 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F) were added in 2020 alongside 👰‍♀️ and 👰‍♂️, completing the gender-neutral wedding set. Skin-tone modifiers apply to the base and to both ZWJ variants.

1. 1865British Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) commissions Henry Poole & Co on Savile Row to make a short celebratory dinner jacket for evening wear, the direct ancestor of the tuxedo.
2. 1886James Brown Potter brings the dinner-jacket style from Sandringham to Tuxedo Park, New York. The Tuxedo Club's autumn ball introduces it to American high society.↗
3. 1886At [Delmonico's in New York](https://mytuxedocatalog.com/blog/125th-anniversary-of-the-tuxedo-part-i-origins/), Tuxedo Park members wearing the new jacket prompt the observation 'that's what they wear for dinner up at Tuxedo,' and the name is born.
4. 1930Marlene Dietrich wears a full men's tuxedo in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco. The image becomes a defining moment for women-in-suiting, decades before emoji.
5. 1962[Dr. No](https://www.bondsuits.com/the-60-year-legacy-of-the-dr-no-dinner-suit/) opens with Sean Connery in a midnight-blue Anthony Sinclair dinner suit saying 'Bond, James Bond.' Globalises the tuxedo as spy-chic.
6. 2016Unicode 9.0 adds `U+1F935` MAN IN TUXEDO. The character is male-coded by default.↗
7. 2019Billy Porter wears a [Christian Siriano tuxedo-gown at the Oscars](https://www.vogue.com/article/billy-porter-oscars-red-carpet-2019-christian-siriano-tuxedo-gown), detonating the standard red-carpet gender expectation and foreshadowing the Unicode 2020 change.
8. 2020[Emoji 13.0](https://www.cnn.com/style/amp/new-emoji-2020-gender-inclusive-scli/index.html) renames the character PERSON IN TUXEDO and adds 🤵‍♀️ woman in tuxedo, 👰‍♂️ man with veil, and gender-neutral Santa. Praised by [Stonewall](https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/gender-neutral-santa-emoji-wedding-dress-man/).
9. 2022First full wedding-season with queer wedding emoji combos working cleanly across all major platforms (Apple, Google, Samsung, WhatsApp).

The tuxedo itself is surprisingly American. Europeans call it a 'dinner jacket,' Italians a 'smoking,' the French a 'smoking' as well (a loanword that's since circled back into English as 'a smoking jacket'). In Japan, タキシード (takishiido) is the standard word, and the tuxedo is tightly associated with Western-style weddings, which remain a popular cultural import. In Arabic Gulf countries, 🤵 is used alongside thawb-and-bisht imagery for men's formal wear, though 🤵 doesn't have a thawb-wearing counterpart yet. In India, 🤵 sits next to sherwani imagery in wedding posts, often paired rather than substituted. In K-pop and K-drama culture, 🤵 is heavily used around boy-group awards-show looks and historical palace scenes where the tuxedo replaces the hanbok on fashion-spread cover shoots.

🤵 was male by default from 2016 to 2020. Emoji 13.0 (2020) renamed the base character PERSON IN TUXEDO and added 🤵‍♂️ man in tuxedo and 🤵‍♀️ woman in tuxedo as ZWJ variants. That same release added 👰‍♂️ man with veil, completing the gender-neutral wedding set. The change was motivated explicitly by LGBTQ+ inclusion and was praised by Stonewall.

• •The tuxedo is named after Tuxedo Park, New York, a private club built in 1886. James Brown Potter brought the jacket style back from a weekend at Sandringham with Edward, Prince of Wales.
• •Dr. No (1962) opens with Sean Connery in a midnight-blue Anthony Sinclair dinner suit. Before that scene the tuxedo was upper-class formalwear; after it, it was global spy iconography.
• •Emoji 13.0 (2020) renamed the character PERSON IN TUXEDO and added 🤵‍♀️ woman in tuxedo, 👰‍♂️ man with veil, and gender-neutral Santa. The release was praised by Stonewall.
• •Marlene Dietrich wore a full men's tuxedo in the 1930 film Morocco, decades before women in tuxedos became standard red-carpet language.
• •Billy Porter's 2019 Oscars tuxedo-gown by Christian Siriano was one of the biggest red-carpet stories of the year and helped frame the cultural expectation for the Unicode 2020 gender-expansion release.
• •'Tuxedo' is an American word. Europeans call it a 'dinner jacket,' Italians and French call it a 'smoking' (loanword from English 'smoking jacket').

• •Reading 🤵 as generic 'man in a suit.' The bow tie makes it specifically formalwear; for business-suit contexts, 👨‍💼 man office worker is the right tool.
• •Assuming 🤵 + 👰 is the only valid wedding combo. Since Emoji 13.0 in 2020 any combination is canonical; queer weddings have been validly representable in emoji for five years.
• •Using 🤵 as 'tuxedo cat.' The emoji is a person; the black-and-white cat meme uses 🐱 or 🐈 paired with 🤵 as a separate element.
• •Pairing 🤵🔫 in a serious crime or violence context. The combo reads as James Bond cosplay or parody; it doesn't translate to earnest armed-person framing.

• •Dr. No (1962) and the following 60 years of James Bond films have made the tuxedo globally synonymous with spy-chic. Every 🤵🔫 in 2026 is a direct descendant of Sean Connery's midnight-blue Anthony Sinclair dinner suit.
• •Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930) wearing a full men's tuxedo in a cabaret scene is the founding moment of women-in-suiting as a fashion statement. Janelle Monáe built an entire aesthetic around the same silhouette 80 years later.
• •Billy Porter at the 2019 Oscars wearing a Christian Siriano tuxedo-gown detonated the red-carpet gender expectation. A year later, Unicode released 🤵‍♀️, 👰‍♂️, and the renamed gender-neutral 🤵.
• •The Oscars red carpet has made 🤵 an annual spike-emoji. Best Dressed lists, tuxedo-variant recaps, and 'who wore it best' content drive hundreds of thousands of 🤵 usages in a single March week.

• •Base: U+1F935U+1F935 PERSON IN TUXEDO. Added to Unicode 9.0 in 2016, renamed from MAN IN TUXEDO in Emoji 13.0 (2020).
• •ZWJ sequences: 🤵‍♂️ is U+1F935 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0FU+1F935 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F. 🤵‍♀️ is U+1F935 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0FU+1F935 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F. Four codepoints each.
• •Skin tones apply to all three: U+1F935 U+1F3FBU+1F935 U+1F3FB through U+1F3FFU+1F3FF for the base, plus the tone modifier in the ZWJ sequence position.
• •Shortcodes: :tuxedo::tuxedo: (older), :person_in_tuxedo::person_in_tuxedo: (newer canonical), :man_in_tuxedo::man_in_tuxedo: / :woman_in_tuxedo::woman_in_tuxedo: for the ZWJ variants.
• •If you're rendering wedding iconography, remember that the 2020 combos are 🤵 + 👰, 🤵 + 🤵, 🤵‍♀️ + 👰, 🤵‍♀️ + 🤵‍♀️, 👰‍♂️ + 👰, and 👰‍♂️ + 🤵. Don't assume only 🤵 + 👰 exists; post-2020 products should support any combination.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.