dress circle

English

Etymology

Formal dress clothing was generally worn in this gallery.

Noun

dress circle (plural dress circles)

1. A gallery in a theater, generally the one containing the prominent and more expensive seats.
   • 2019, Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution:

     This concerned complaints arising under the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by blacks denied hotel accommodations in Kansas and Missouri, excluded from the ladies' car of a train in Tennessee, and barred from the dress circle of a theater in San Francisco and from the Grand Opera House of New York City.