page_title: Mess dress uniform
section_title: Australia
hierarchical_section_title: Mess dress uniform / Australia
caption_attribution_description: English: Australian Col. (retired) Sandy MacGregor talks about being a "tunnel rat" during a formal ball with Soldiers of 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team Aug. 1, 2013, Vicenza, Italy. MacGregor served in the Royal Australian Engineers deploying to Vietnam as a captain, commanding the 3rd Field Troop Engineers, September 1965-1966. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Opal Vaughn)
context_page_description: Mess dress uniform is the semi-formal type of uniforms used by military, police, fire and other public uniformed services for certain ceremonies, receptions, and celebrations, in messes or on private occasions. It frequently consists of a mess jacket, trousers, white dress shirt, often with standing collar and bow tie, along with orders and medals insignia. Design may depend on regiment or service branch, e.g. army, navy, air force, marines, etc. In Western dress codes, mess dress uniform is a permitted supplementary alternative equivalent to the civilian black tie for evening wear or black lounge suit for day wear - sometimes collectively called half dress - although military uniforms are the same for day and evening wear. As such, mess dress uniform is considered less formal than full dress uniform, but more formal than service dress uniform.
  Prior to World War II, this style of military uniform was largely restricted to the British and United States Armed Forces, although the French, German, Swedish and other navies had adopted their own versions of mess dress during the late 19th century, influenced by the British Royal Navy.
context_section_description: The Australian Army has separate mess kits for summer and winter. The summer mess kit is a white jacket, almost identical between different branches of the army. The winter mess kit is made of thicker material, with jackets in the colour (scarlet or dark blue) of the wearers' corps. The winter mess dress includes a waistcoat. Both kits have the same barrathea blue trousers, but trousers vary in the colour and width of leg stripe denoting corps. Women's mess attire is the same, except that women may wear a skirt instead of trousers. Both versions are worn with a bow tie and white shirt; Marcella for winter and plain for summer.
  The Royal Australian Air Force has different mess uniforms for summer and winter. The summer mess kit is marked out by a white jacket while the winter jacket is dark blue.
caption: A retired colonel of the Australian Army in winter mess dress, 2013.
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