Tuxedo Cat Day falls on 31 January. Nobody seems sure who started it. It isn’t run by a charity and has no official history. But it’s a good excuse to look properly at one of the most common, and most photogenic, cats on the street.
Not a breed, a shirt
A tuxedo cat is a bicolour cat: mostly black, with white limited to the paws, chest, belly and throat, often the chin, and sometimes the tip of the tail. It looks like evening dress, which is where the name comes from. Any breed can have it, and so can any street cat.
The white comes from a white-spotting gene. While a kitten grows, it stops the colour cells reaching some patches of skin, so the fur there grows white. One copy of the gene gives a little white, like a tuxedo. Two copies give a lot, like a cat that’s mostly white with black patches.
The tuxedos of Whitehall
Britain’s government buildings have a long line of cats, and some of the most famous were black-and-white strays.
- Humphrey was a long-haired stray found by a civil servant. He lived at Downing Street from 1989 to 1997, through three prime ministers, then retired to the suburbs, where he lived until 2006.
- Palmerston was found wandering the streets of London, hungry and underweight, and ended up at Battersea. In 2016 he became the Foreign Office’s cat, and spent four years feuding with Larry, the cat at No. 10 next door. He retired in 2020, came out of retirement in 2025 to move to Bermuda with its new governor, and died there in February 2026.
Two more famous tuxedos
- Socks, the Clinton family’s cat, lived in the White House for all eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, in the 1990s.
- Félicette, a black-and-white cat from Paris, became the first cat in space in October 1963. She flew on a French rocket and came back down alive.
What to do on 31 January
- Photograph the tuxedos on your street, and look at where each one’s white falls. No two are the same, which makes them easy to tell apart.
- Give them proper names. A street with five cats called Socks has a problem.
- If you’re adopting, don’t walk past them. Mostly black cats wait longer for homes. Read our story for Black Cat Day.
- Check for an ear tip. The ones without one need neutering.
Snap the tuxedos on your street. Each one’s shirt is its fingerprint.
