Collar and Tie to Die?

Men are still tying neckties

The Collar and tie expected to die out in British workplace within 50 years, study claims.


I disagree but to be quite honest my opinion is one of extreme prejudice.  I sell neckties.  Besides, men's suits are back and neckties and suits are hard to separate. 

Check out excerps from the article in the Telegraph March 17th 2012 - a link to the complete article and survey is below.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) thought the tie would not survive within British firms beyond the next half a century with the popularity of the open-collared shirt.


Its demise is being blamed on the boom in creative businesses, such as Facebook and Google, and online trading companies where formal dress codes tend to be shunned in favour of a more casual approach.

Once considered an important part of business dress, the tie has become a victim of the spread of ''casual Fridays'' into other weekdays, according to researchers.

The corporate necktie could join corsets, top hats and coat tails as a thing of the past with the workplace moving to more casual dressing, according to a recent poll.

Just under a quarter of those surveyed by DealJungle.com -a UK deals site for small business - even put the tie’s demise in under a decade.  ''The success of businesses such as Facebook and Google, where even the CEO turns up wearing jeans and a hoodie, also seems to have had a corrosive effect on the idea of dressing formally for work,” a DealJungle spokesman said.

Do you think neckties will become a thing of the past? 

Read more and leave your comment here - The Telegraph March 17th 2003

Related article and survey in new.au.com

Are Ties Cool Again?

Models present creations by French designer Veronique
Nichanian for Hermes - the Men's Autumn-Winter 2012-13

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.“ 

I never actually understood how that could be.  I guess it is one of the clichés that meant something at a certain time, something fashionable, not necessarily fashionable in the sense of fashion attire, but a state of fashion regarding what society accepts as chic or maybe just society itself. 

As seen in late January in a Paris Men's fashion show neckties are hardly a forgotten fashion accessory.  The necktie has seen a new sense of recognition by designers and young men, especially skinny ties.  Wearing suits is back in style and ties are meant to go with them.  Things change regarding fashion - that's what fashion means. What was fashionable once, can be again.  Everything that is created, or envisioned is influenced by what has been.  Sometimes ideas, especially fashion ideas are reborn, with a new found appreciation.   Kind of like when color television and film replaced black and white.  It was not very long before black and white film was considered an art and became a much appreciated medium in story telling.  Story telling just seemed to have a greater passion with the life like realism of color replaced with black and white.

The point I am making is regarding an attitude towards neckties by young men that has caused a stylish craze that has escaped most men of years.  Apparently men wearing neckties are gracing the runways of the fashion world, on the college campus as ties are making a big comeback in the men's retail.   Narrow ties have especially become a favorite of younger men that recently considered wearing ties as a restriction to their freedom.  When men were wearing neckties religiously a rebellious wave against ties became a means of expression for youth.

For at least the last two or three decades, wearing neckties became a sort of un-fashion statement by youth.  It was an easy way to be different and unique, shunning authority by resisting to conform to a way that their fathers had deemed proper.  For a young man novelty theme ties like music and rock and roll themes had been the tie of choice as at least it was a way to make a statement. To be cool and still be a rebel even though it was not possible to avoid the dreaded conforming to an unpopular dress code.  This was one of the great successes of Jerry Garcia ties.


Now, serious fashion ties like rep stripes and conservative design are being tied around the necks of the young.   By sharp contrast, men are becoming less refined embracing a casual attire in a similar way and for possibly the same reason, to become free of authoritive fashion.  Maybe they want to feel young and free again. 

So there it is,  “The more things change, the more they stay the same.“  kind-of-sort-of.

Related article, Times Live - Life Style Jan 23, 2012
Now that older men have ditched it to look cool, the stylish young are reclaiming the necktie as their own, with the once-derided accessory making a stealthy comeback on the menswear runways.

At Lanvin on Sunday there were no ties until the finale, but there were neckties for all the evening looks — save for a single bow-tie, a nod to the personal style of designer Alber Elbaz.

"Ties are a part of the suit that is coming back," Elbaz confirmed. "Not the ties of our fathers or grandfathers. They are worn by a new generation that comes from sport, new technologies.  "It's neither the world of the dandy nor of the boardroom."  Read more Could Neckties Be Cool Again

The Secret Way to Tie a Windsor Tie Knot

The Duke of Windsor demonstrating how he ties
the "Windsor" tie knot, however he is tying it a
confusing way on purpose so not all men could look so dashing 

This is the way to tie the Windsor necktie knot that the Duke of Windsor wanted you to see.  As well, this is probably the way your father showed you how to tie a Windsor.  It is not the way some men tie this “fashionably correct” symmetrical tie knot as there is an easier way to make a Windsor Knot. However, the Duke did not want you to know about that.  

Most likely you have given up on mastering the art of tying a Windsor as it is no easy task unless you know the secret way to do it.  If that is the case or if you are making a Windsor knot when you tie your tie and it seems really difficult then you should check out the tie knot diagram below.  When you are finished the dimple is easily formed and when you take the tie off the entire length is revealed with no inner knot left to undo.

The romantic story about the Windsor Necktie Knot

The Sexy Way to Tie a Necktie Knot

Well I must say, this was strong competition for April, our original sexy tie tying necktie lesson girl.   So I retired her.  Man, that sure was a hard opening line, and full of keywords for neckties too. Watch this babe tie a nice necktie knot just for you.  Now there is one more reason to learn how to tie a tie. .

This is absolutely the sexiest Windsor Necktie Knot lesson I have ever seen.  Not only is Ashley tying the Windsor in a very pleasant way to observe, thanks to her charming good looks, she is tying the Windsor necktie knot the correct way.  There are several ways to tie a tie that looks like the Windsor, although those tie knots are not easy to master and are very clumsy to accomplish.  In the end they may look like a Windsor tie knot with a symmetrical shape after some careful however thumb and index finger work, they are not the Windsor and they do not form a sexy dimple below the knot without extra effort..

The worst thing about making what I call a fake Windsor tie knot instead of the real thing is that the tie knot actually has an inner knot that makes taking the tie off complicated.  That inner knot must be un-wound carefully after the tie is removed from around your neck as it becomes much tighter when you take it off.   If the tie is not completely untied promptly the next time you will want to wear it the inner lining and the tie itself will have an unrelenting twist and will be most likely be completely damaged beyond use..

April will show you how its done the right way unlike many other videos including a very horrible demonstration by G.Q. I found about a year ago on line. 

Visit our on line necktie shop to check out our Windsor Necktie Knot Lesson   It may not be as sexy as this necktie tying lesson but it is well worth the time to see. And, you will learn the mystery of the Windsor tie knot.  It is quite a romantic story.

Neckties and Rock and Roll

Mick Jagger in a recent photo
wearing a narrow "cool guy" necktie

Rock and roll musicians wearing ties are not a common fashion trend for sure, however it was not always the case.

A visitor to this blog asked me for my opinion on this matter so with his permission I have decided to post his question and my anwser.  A follow up post in the next day or so will be my theory on why rock and rollers don't wear neckties. 

Check out this related post The Peacock Effect for Sake of Originality about the music industry and neckties.  This article actually gives ties a bit of slack as those narrow neckties are a favorite of cool guy musicians. 

Ties and musicians or to be on point - no ties and musicians; what comes to mind is the Beatles and their influence on a generation that in just a decade caused a great shift in culture, which had quite an effect on what fashion meant to youth.  Of course most notably - the advent of a loss for barbers.  The Beatles did wear neckties in the beginning of "Beatle Mania," you can see for youself in the photo below.

Jeffrey, I just spent a few minutes on your blog looking for something to answer this:  "When did the necktie stop being used routinely by music groups?" (and thus lead the way to informality, in general, in the general public of the USA)

This was a question I asked myself after I was sent a sixties pic of Peter and Gordon... of course they were wearing neckties.

I have a pic of men wearing black trousers, vests, suit jackets, and black bowler hats from 1906, with the enormous fish they caught near Catalina. In August! Today I would be in shorts and tee shirt and a wide brim white hat.

Elvis wearing a necktie

Clearly things have changed.

Do you have a sense of when musicians like the Beatles and Stones and others stopped wearing them?

The Beach Boys wore them, up to a point too.

I'm a sixty year old and grew up with LA radio music, beginning in about 1957, and living in the Pacific Palisades. My dad stopped wearing a hat about when I was born, and I always figured that was a So Cal thing. But this is really not about hats, or suits, it's about the tie...

Thanks for any insights; perhaps this would be a good topic for your blog. -Corey, Tracy CA

Corey,

I am going to post your email message if you do not mind in a forum of sort’s format.

I have often wondered about this as well. I have memories of images on TV and in magazines and newspapers of the Beatles wearing ties. I was 8 years old when Ed Sullivan had them on his show. I'll never forget that introduction. In the latter half of 60's a change was occurring in society which was certainly the cause of the un-popular Vietnam War and the free love movement. I guess a hippie wearing a necktie would send a soft message and absolutely yield conformity to authority that was not within the main objective of becoming free of what we now know as corporate corruption. By comparison, I do not see many "Occupiers" in suits and ties - that would send a mixed message I guess.

The Beatles and Ed Sullivan wearing neckties 1965

I did a post about a year ago that illustrates the necktie and the musician issue. It may have something to do with the thought that musicians are artists and supper creative, while the managers and businessmen “the suits" are not creative at least in the artistic sense. They are seriously managing difficult and complex financial matters, and being respectful of the dynamic of big business is all too important. An artist probably has no concept of that abstract world and wearing the attire that is customary within that institution just was not going fit in the “groovy universe” that musicians had to exist in. Certainly not while most of the people who were adoring them were in jeans and T shirts with beads hanging around their necks - not ties.

Jimmy Hendrix wearing a tie

There has been a major change in what is considered an acceptable dress for men over the last two decades that has casualized society into a ( if I dare say it ) a sloppy state. I recall that about 15 years ago I read in a newspaper that it was OK if a woman wore clothing that revealed the straps to her bra. The fashion world deemed that it was OK for exposing something that was meant to be un-seen. None-the-less, women have always taken much more care of their appearance then men spending fortunes in time and money to have a look that affords the attention that they desire. For the most part men also desire to be as attractive as possible; however it wasn’t long ago that men took greater care in their attire. I guess men have become much more relaxed abandoning suits and neckties - what is now considered too conservative. Up until the last two decades of the past century every man had a few suits and many ties. Now most men have not even one suit and cannot tie a tie to save their life let alone wear one. - Jeffrey

Jeffrey,

I have looked at the album covers of the Beach Boys and within at least one site aside from Wikipedia. An early photo shows them wearing ties. Album covers from the earliest do not show them in the standard dress attire with ties, although they might be called yuppies for what they wore: Pendletons on one, which were expensive then as now, and others with open collared button downs, and others with crew neck sweaters, etc. You might enjoy the trips on Memory Lane, I suggest you simply go to Wiki and do the discography.

My Pacific Palisades upbringing was surely upper middle class, and we wore ties to dances until the late sixties. Long Hair Rebellion at Pali High was actually LA Times news in 1966.

It seems to me the album cover of Sgt. Pepper (1967?) influenced change and maybe one could make the case for the shift away from ties at about the same time. Beatles were very influential on modes of casual dress and I was part of the group that adopted those changes.

I spent my career in technical efforts in chemistry and did not wear a tie but perhaps a dozen times in 30 yrs. The managers of the efforts did wear ties thru the 90's, and my experience was that by the 2000's only the upper-class, or senior management, felt ties were necessary on a daily basis. I fielded a tie for interviews, presentations to management, and for banquets. My work was not "business" per se.

Thanks again for your reply and expansions.

I still wear a tie at times... and I tie my own... but my 30-something kids don't. 
I will always think that a fine shirt and even finer tie makes a fine appearance.

Thanks, Corey

Now if there ever was a contradiction - maybe a rock and roller won't wear a necktie but you may want to wear a rock and roll tie yourself .  Checkout our collection of limited edition rock and roll neckties.

The Rolling Stones Necktie                                   Jimmy Hendrix Tie 

The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Tie



Jimmy Hendrix Rock and Roll Tie

A Surfer on a Mission

A Surfer wearing a suit and tie on a mission

Why would a surfer go surfing wearing a suit and tie?

I used to surf so I have some idea of what is going on here.  From the looks of the sky I would say that this is the probably afternoon and the bluffs in the background look like a typical California shore line. 

So with that knowledge in mind I can more or less come to the conclusion that this surfer who running towards the surf wearing a suit and necktie for the following reasons

He has just gotten off work another clue why this is probably afternoon and not morning.  The surf is really good because if it is afternoon and because this is most likely southern California this would mean that it is the "afternoon glass-off" ( that is when the surf gets really good when the wind dies down and water is smooth like glass ).  We know the surf is really good because the surfer is running and there is no time to waste.  Certainly the reason why he is still wearing a suit and necktie.

Why Does Yogi the Bear Wear a Tie

Why does Yogi the Bear wear a necktie?

Finally, why Yogi the Bear wears neckties and Booboo wears a bow tie.  It's part a technical and part a fashionable answer.

It seems like a silly thing to think about but actually it is not so stupid of a thought. I was bored about a year ago so I decided to find out why Fred Flintstone wore neckties and entered the question “why does Fred Flintstone wear ties” in a Google search. I was surprised to see page after page of pages that had the same or similar query. So I decided to find out for myself, which became quite a bit of work. Surely the artists at Hana Barara had some reason to have some of their cartoon characters wear ties.


That resulted in an article that was posted on Feb 5 2011 Why does Fred Flintstone wear neckties  You'll want to checkout this post after you read this one.

Thanks to someone who left a comment on my blog article about Fred Flintstone wearing neckties I found this Web Page about Yogi the Bear wearing neckties.  You'll want to check this video out as no matter what you may think about how silly this really is the video is very interesting and quite informative concerning cartoons and television.  I did promise to continue my research, so this was a great find for me as I never would have figured this out. That promise also included checking into why Yogi the Bear wore a tie, so now I can finalize my Fred Flintstone article which was a speculation on my part.  It did not touch the technical issue and probably the real reason for tie wearing cartoon characters.

Apparently the reason these two cartoon characters; Fred Flintstone, and Yogi the Bear, and lets not forget Booboo wear a collar and a tie is a technical one.  To create to a cartoon character that moved an spoke with detail was time consumig.  The character bodies has much less movement and detail that changes then the heads and creating the same thing over and over with the only changes to the details of the character faces was a redundant task.  This had proved to limit the artistic value of the cartoons due to time and financial budgets.

It was very time consuming and costly for the artists to create characters that had movement details like neccessary for speaking.  The creative solution was to marry several different illustrations together, the cartoon character heads, bodies, and the backgrounds.  To conceal the artistic work and any difficulty regarding adding the artwork illustrating the heads to each character body was to add a collar and tie.  This saved a great deal of effort and time, not to mention money.  This gave way to cartoons that had characters that were more life like, thanks to this method of allowing a solution to create the details that allow the cartoon characters to speak and move as realistically as possible.

Now, one thing comes to mind that warrants something else to be considered here. Yes, the collar is a great way to conceal, in an artistic way the mechanics and any problems concerning the challenge of dropping in an animated cartoon character head that has much more movement than an animated cartoon character body. However that does not answer fully the question why Yogi and Fred wear a necktie but not other cartoon characters like George Jetson. Couldn’t Yogi and Fred have just collars and no ties?

I think that Yogi and Fred need to have an extra accessory, the necktie to add a bit of character and charm to their personalities. After all Fred Flintstone and Yogi the Bear are bit goofy so wearing neckties make them much more sophisticated and easier to appreciate. Isn’t that the reason that men wear neckties in the real world? It is all about respect, a man or a cartoon character who wears a tie sure gets a great deal of that.

Plumbers Crack or Neckties?

Doing the plummers crack Instead of wearing ties?

Yesterday I found this picture on Face Book.  Another post by my ex wife that make me feel very fortunate to have known her and, lucky enough have loved her and to be honest - still in love with her. - Jeffrey Hunter

Every once in a while I am reminded again of  the poor taste in the attire adorned lately, especially by young men.  This poor judgement in fashion is either the cause, or the effect of the horrible state that society is in.  I do not know what could possibly be the motive or the cause of having such a mindset - that would make a young man wear his pants, or actually not wearing his pants like so blatantly illustrated in the photograph at the left.

If men wore ties like they used to and dressed as if that had an ounce of respect for themselves, let alone others; civilization would certainly be in a greater place.  It seems that at this time we have reached an unimaginable lack of sophistication that has a direct connection to the demise of modern man's lack of fashion consciousness.   Exposing underwear like this is not a fashion statement - it is a fashion failure and with no question, a complete disregard for common decency. 

Whenever someone starts that stupid necktie argument with me the very first thing I counter with is, "and wearing a pair of pants with the waist hanging somewhere closer to the knees then where it is meant to be, thus exposing underwear that are in no way meant to be seen, ( that is why they are called underwear - right ) makes absolutely no sense I guess."  If wearing a necktie makes a man feel uncomfortable then what the heck is purpose of showing the world underwear and worse plumbers crack too.  It is not sexy, it's rude and it surely spells out loud and very clear, a lack of class and intellegence.   That is something that is absolutely impossible to achieve if that same young man were to wear a necktie and as well his pants that way they are meant and designed to be worn.

I just cannot understand so many things now-a-days that I feel so very old and lost and crazy.  Maybe it is everyone else that is lost and crazy not me and as well the guys that wear the pants the correct way and also wear neckties.

Checkout these two related posts

Another "Ties are Dooms Day of Fashion and Freedom" Wed Site

What Casual Really Means

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Mona Lisa Tie

Merry Christmas to all

Time Sharing Ties

Online Closet at Tie Society
necktie trading via the web

Necktie Trading Leads To Netflix-Like Business


Necktie sharing! If I did not read about it on line and hear it on National Public Radio I wouldn't have believed it. Tired of your ties, don't want to spend money on new neckties, well here is the answer.  Tie trading is about as novel as any idea I have ever heard of regarding men's ties. Hats off gentlemen and ties on!    Jeffrey Hunter

An idea that has seen its day for
men's attire - Trading Ties
 Necktie Time Sharing!

December 19, 2011
Renee Montagne, Linda Wertheimer Host
National Public Radio  - A year ago, former IBM consultant Zac Gittens and his friends realized they could expand their professional wardrobes by pooling their resources. Their tie trading worked so well for them, they left their jobs and last month launched Tie Society, which operates out of a Washington, D.C townhouse.

Of course, people share more than just information. Some cities offer car sharers or bike sharing services. And today's last word in business is: tie share, as in neckties.  Read more here N.P.R The Last Word in Business

Listen to the N.P.R. interview
The Tie Society - www.tiesociety.com/
How it Works
The Necktie Collection - hundreds of ties to choose from