At the gala awards ceremony thrown by the Council of Fashion Designers of America recently, most attendees – including Harry Connick Jr., Francisco Costa, Olivier Theyskens, and the evening’s host, Jeremy Piven – wore black. But black was by no means the required uniform for those walking the red carpet.

The president of the CFDA, Stan Herman, for one, wore white. Mr. Herman said he “felt like a prince” wearing a double-breasted white Ralph Lauren dinner jacket with a pleated shirt and tuxedo pants to the awards. “It really dresses up your life,” he said. “When you wear a black jacket, you’re part of the background; when you wear a white jacket, you’re the bandleader.”

After a half-century hiatus, the white dinner jacket is re-emerging as menswear’s hot ticket item, with retailers and designers from H&M to Giorgio Armani selling them this season. Its comeback dovetails with women’s wear’s apparent summer lovefest with all things white – from fitted denim pants to eyelet skirts and blouses.

The new white blazer does not necessarily connote the formality it did in the 1940s, when the luminous jacket was a favorite among Hollywood’s leading men, including Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda.

“It’s no longer white smoking jackets, worn with cummerbunds,” the chairman of the department of menswear design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Mark Evan Blackman, said. “They’re being worn with denim, with a pair of khakis, with running pants and a hoodie. People are taking an icon that’s associated with the best of the best and humanizing it.”

While a white dupioni silk blazer by a New York-based custom tailor, Leonard Logsdail, costs a cool $3,800, those unable to shell out four figures for a sport jacket can choose from a bevy of less expensive options. Ralph Lauren has a $995 luxury linen sportcoat, and Dolce & Gabbana offers a $795 cotton sport jacket, on the higher end. More moderate choices include Brooks Brothers’s linen sports jacket and the Marc by Marc Jacobs baby corduroy Bedford blazer, both selling for about $300. White blazers by Gap and H&M are cheaper still, retailing for $78 and $49.90, respectively.

Since it’s still perceived as the black blazer’s “wealthy, uppity, distantly related cousin,” an inexpensive white dinner jacket can fool the eye, Mr. Blackman said. “You can take the cheapest white fabric, make a white jacket, and people will perceive it as something more expensive than it actually is because of its legacy,” he said.

The white dinner jacket became popular during the 1920s, but hit its stride in the years following the Great Depression, Mr. Blackman said. “Those who had money wanted to show the world,” he said. “In the white dinner jacket, there has always been an element of ostentation, of one-upmanship, and that persists today.”

The white jacket remained popular into the 1960s, when formal attire gave way to radical chic during the Vietnam War era. Mr. Blackman said the jacket’s recent resurgence so many years later is emblematic of “the excess in the air.” He said that while a generation ago garments reflected one’s bottom line, today more people are “dressing up, and buying up.”

An image adviser, Samantha von Sperling, said the trend is more about wistfulness than it is about excess. “It’s been a rough few years,” Ms. von Sperling, the founder of Polished Social Image Consultants, said. “The news is a scary thing to watch, and I think people have nostalgia for a more innocent time in history.”

Since dark colors perennially dominate men’s fashion, white dinner jackets can be scene-stealers, according to Daniel Silver, who designs alongside Steven Cox for the fashion house Duckie Brown. “It says, ‘I don’t necessarily want you to look at me, but I want you to notice me,'” he said.

Mr. Herman, the CFDA president, said he liked the attention his white dinner jacket commanded. He said he plans to wear the blazer to less formal summer gatherings, perhaps pairing it with blue jeans and flip-flops.

Taking a wardrobe element, be it formalwear or camouflage, out of its natural habitat is “what makes fashion fun,” the executive editor of mens.style.com, Tyler Thoreson, said. “It’s about high-low pairing,” he said. “The white dinner jacket back in its heyday was elegant and within the rules, and now people are mixing and matching, and making up their own rules.” Mens.style.com is the online home of the men’s fashion and lifestyles magazines GQ and Details.

“The white dinner jacket is the latest evidence that men are taking more control over their sense of style,” he said. “The whole idea behind formalwear is for men to look the same and for women to get all the attention.”

The white dinner jacket explodes that notion, Mr. Thoreson said. “You can go to H&M, or you can go to Dior or Balenciaga; you’re just as likely to see one in a cool bar in Williamsburg as you are at Soho House,” he said, referring to a private social club in Manhattan.

The coat’s newfound versatility means that men may be wearing them even after the traditional Labor Day cutoff for white clothing. Menswear designer Thom Browne’s fall 2006 collection comprises three white dinner jackets, made of pleated silk, cashmere flannel, and perforated paper and costing $8,000, $4,000, and $3,630, respectively. “I don’t really follow the rules,” Mr. Browne said.