monkey suit

monkey suit

slang A full tuxedo or a uniform, especially one that is meant to appear formal. Supposedly a reference to an organ grinder's monkey, which was often dressed in some kind of suit. I don't know why he insisted on wearing a monkey suit to the party—he's going to be horribly overdressed. I like my job, but I wish they didn't make me wear this monkey suit all day!
See also: monkey, suit
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

monkey suit

a tuxedo. (Jocular. Possibly in reference to the fancy suit worn by an organ-grinder's monkey.) Do I have to wear a monkey suit to dinner? All the men except me wore monkey suits at dinner on the cruise.
See also: monkey, suit
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • get (one's) monkey up
  • put (one's) monkey up
  • put a person's monkey up
  • have your monkey up
  • have (one's) monkey up
  • the British disease
  • black tie
  • have got a monkey on (one's) back
  • monkey talk
  • cheeky monkey
References in periodicals archive
He had secured his place on the show after volunteering to unicycle while dressed in a monkey suit and won the prize after answering a series of questions.
"You actually felt Bubbles was a kid in a monkey suit," Mirror quoted Jackson's biographer as saying.
4 Monkey Suit An irresistible French monkey pops up on every piece of stoneware in Juliska's Petit Singe dinnerware, each as unique as the leaf dessert plate ($35).To order at Write On Sarasota, 1423 First St..
So many things went wrong, but perhaps the worst was a phenomenally expensive 100-foot moving Kong model that was substituted in the end for a man in a monkey suit climbing the Twin Towers (interestingly, World Trade Centre workers, angered at the decision to use their place of work, staged a protest on the 102nd floor in monkey suits - they could have got the role).
Initially viewed as nothing more than a publicity stunt, the man in the monkey suit, Stuart Drummond, has since been re-elected with an increased share of the popular vote.
Maybe in Beijing a singing messenger in a gorilla suit can be arrested fingerprinted mildly tortured and released without anyone ever realizing that theres a man in the monkey suit. Maybe its possible for a clever village boy to make a fantastic Monkey King-like journey and come home with the cotton-candy machine for which he was sent out.
Dawn went as Bubbles so she just wore a monkey suit, which was funny for about two minutes and then she had to take the head off or else she would have suffocated.
There were barely 30 fans from Hartlepool, including the mascot in a monkey suit who rather puzzlingly asked me at one point whether I was the missing link.
Matthew Whitton, now an ex-Clayton County, Ga., police officer, and his partner, an ex-Clayton County corrections officer named Rick Dyer, claimed that they had DNA evidence that their find was a Sasquatch, when it fact it was road kill stuffed inside a monkey suit and packed in ice.
Burton also persuaded Charlton Heston to return to the ape saga, but this time to get inside a monkey suit to play Tim Roth's father.
I'm not just a little guy in a monkey suit this time around.
Keith Willans donned a monkey suit and stood on Norton high street to raise funds for Frederick Nattrass Primary School.
You don't need a monkey suit - dress as casual as you like.
Or the current fatuous votes on "directly elected mayors", for which we have clearly all been crying out since we saw such brilliant examples as Ken and Boris, the man in the monkey suit in Hartlepool and that English Democrat in Doncaster.
But he added he did not agree with the current system in place for elected mayors which has seen Ken Livingstone voted in in London, former local CID head Ray Mallon gain the seat in Middlesbrough and a man in a monkey suit given control of Hartlepool.