Cummerbund
broad waist sash, usually pleated, which is often worn with single-breasted dinner jackets or tuxedos
A cummerbund is a broad waist sash, usually pleated, which is often worn with single-breasted dinner jackets (or tuxedos). The cummerbund was adopted by British military officers in colonial India, where they saw it worn by sepoys (Indian soldiers) of the British Indian Army. It was adopted as an alternative to the waistcoat, and later spread to civilian use. The modern use of the cummerbund for Europeans and North Americans is as a component of the traditional black tie Western dress code.
Etymology
The word cummerbund is the Anglicized form of Hindustani kamarband (Hindustani: कमरबंद; کمربند), which originated from the Persian (Persian: کمربند, romanized: kamarband). It entered English vocabulary in 1616 from India. It is a combination of the Persian words kamar meaning 'waist' and band meaning 'to close' or 'fasten' (not to be confused with ‘band’ from Old Norse, reinforced in late Middle English by Old French bande, of Germanic origin; related to bind, though both ultimately descend from Proto-Indo-European *bʰendʰ "to bind", "bond"). The 'waist-band' was a sash accessory worn by Indian men for many occasions.
The word cummerband (see below), and less commonly the German spelling Kummerbund (a Germanized spelling variation of the English word), are often used synonymously with cummerbund in English.
Description
Form and occasion
The form of the cummerbund is a wide band around the waist.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cummerbund” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.