Nothing makes us civilians happier than watching the arbiters of high fashion gnash with rage at the refusal of the public to obey their ridiculous orders. So it is with the good old necktie. We’re told it’s stuffy, outdated, a relic of a previous century when men were expected to be in uniform for business, and it should surely have gone the way of the bowler hat and the periwig.
Yet on it goes, seen at countless menswear shows this year. At luxury e-retailer Mr Porter, reports The Wall Street Journal, tie sales are up 26 per cent year-on-year, indicating that they are still big business for fashion houses. And though the boardrooms of tech companies in the 1990s were, briefly, infested with Armani suits teamed with V-neck T-shirts and baseball boots, that vogue has passed. The advice I was given as a nipper – round the tree and down the rabbit hole – is as useful today as it ever was.
From left: Balmain, Valentino, Junya Watanabe, Saint Laurent and LGN Louis Gabriel Nouchi
I feel nothing but relief, personally, at the fact fashion houses are still churning them out. You can’t go far wrong with a tie. And they last your whole life: your tie rack is a little time capsule. My wardrobe still contains a now moth-eaten square-ended wool tie that belonged to my late grandfather. Old Etonians, MCC and Garrick Club members may signal to each other, like mastodons across the primeval swamp, by means of their neckwear, but for most of us the tie is not a statement of allegiance: it’s a bland but unobjectionable way of signalling a certain amount of respect for the world and your place in it.
Nobody minds being given a tie for Christmas. The suit (or blazer) and tie is a safe haven in a bewildering world. You may have a bad suit or a good suit, but nobody – unless you attract the attention of that man on X who does 32 posts explaining why your lapels are too wide – will judge you if it’s the former. And against this reassuringly uniform background, the tie is a way to express a modest flash of individuality. Even Donald Trump’s bizarre floor-length ties have a certain je ne sais quoi.
And ties, unlike other items of apparel, can make gestures that go beyond simply putting them on. A tie can be used to clean mist off your specs. It can be flung over your shoulder as you bend to concentrate on an important task. If you’re feeling manly, it can be wrenched off dramatically in the evening before you sashay on to the dancefloor or leap into bed with your inamorata.
That said, choosing ties is a perilous business. It was my attraction to shiny, metallic patterns – lizard green or beetle purple – that caused a long-ago ex-girlfriend to say to me (in a tone not so much of reproach as of sympathetic wonder), ‘You really don’t have any sort of aesthetic sense, do you?’ In my defence, I have never owned a piano-key tie – the invention of which was the source, in the film Zoolander, of the villainous Mugatu’s ill-gotten riches.
My wife still vets my choice of tie when we go to a smartish party – vetoing, disappointingly, the ones with repeating Homer Simpson doughnuts in favour of a modest abstract pattern in matt fabric. And if there’s one way that neckwear has changed over the years it’s that ties used to be for the office. Now that Generation WFH does its work in egg-stained pyjamas, the tie is reserved for a night on the town.
It adds a bit of class. With that in mind, a bow tie (unless it’s black tie or white tie) is a no-no. It’s the preserve of men who consider themselves a ‘bit of a character’. Watch at parties as guests escape like shoals of fish before said characters, knowing that a crashing bore is going to buttonhole them for 20 minutes. But an ordinary tie gives nobody offence.
The showier among us may go for a bulgy double-Windsor knot (I remember marvelling when I saw the late restaurant critic A A Gill at parties; he seemed to have a shiny tennis-ball lodged at his throat), while nightclub bouncers, at least apocryphally, know a clever non-slip knot so they can’t be strangled if they get in a fight. Otherwise, your basic knot, learned as a boy, will see you right. Round the tree, down the rabbit hole.
