Notes on a receding shirt line
I didn’t set out to be a tie guy. Actually (unlike prep school students or college fraternity members), I never really wore one until I got my first job out of college at a publishing house, where I had few to go with the two cheap suits I owned. Then I went to graduate school, where I was employed part-time as a teaching fellow. A tie was a useful badge of adult status, given that I wasn’t much older—and otherwise not any differently dressed— than the students I was teaching. To this day I pledge a largely ersatz allegiance to my working-class roots in my attachment to cotton and denim.
It was really only when I settled into a job as a high school teacher that the ties became a thing. But it happened gradually, without any real effort on my part. My wife and mother liked giving them to me as birthday and Christmas presents, and it didn’t take long for them to start accumulating. And then of course there were my students, who typically gifted me more playful ones. Before long I was referring to them as “anti-soporific devices,” and began sporting neckwear tied to occasions (like my Edvund Munch “Scream” tie on exam days). There are now hundreds taking up the lion’s share of space in my closet. I have something like a six-month rotation, because there are some I like wearing more than once a year, and about a dozen for the weeks before Christmas (along with candy corn for Halloween, and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln arguing with each other over who’s birthday is being celebrated on President’s Day).
Men’s neckties date back to the mid-seventeenth century, when Croatian mercenaries serving the French in the Thirty Years War wore them in Paris and caused a sensation. The tradition widened—and narrowed—with the tides of fashion in the centuries that followed. Ties are the one wholly non-utilitarian piece of clothing a man wears. Women typically adorn themselves with any number of accouterments to enhance their self-presentation, sometimes enduring notable discomfort to do so. A constricted neck is usually as far as a man will go, and even that is likely to get loosened over the course of a day.
There appear to be signs that ties are really, truly on the way out. Fashion has been headed that way for some time, at least since “Aloha Friday” made its way to California and spread east into what we now know as “Casual Friday.” Covid loosened convention still further, and we’re now at a point where your garden-variety billionaire no longer deigns to wear one. (Men’s hats went out of fashion when John F. Kennedy stopped wearing them, though baseball caps have filled the vacuum.) I sometimes wonder what on earth I’m going to do with all those ties (a problem that pales in comparison to the problem I have with all those books), even as I’m aware that I’m becoming a relic. Someday people will look a pictures of people like me and regard them with the same curiosity they regard eighteenth-century wigs and breeches. But for a little while longer, I’m going to close that top button on my Oxford shirt and pull that (Double!) Windsor knot tight. It just feels more comfortable that way.
Jim Cullen teaches at the Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut. His most recent book is the third edition of Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen in American Life.
Next to a clerical collar, they’re probably the most useful piece of fashion a man can don to make life easier. A clerical collar will actually get you out of a ticket (at least in the northeast). But a tie and jacket can smooth many a water too. When I was commuting to Princeton as a student in the 1980s, the security guards in the parking lot would almost always want to see my ID (the campus is rather porous to the surrounding community, and this is back before they had stickers for cars). I decided to experiment and, changing nothing else, just toss on a tie and sports jacket. Presto! Where once there was icy skepticism I now earned a warm and deferential “Pleasant morning!” I’ve continued to do that in many environments where I’m not known by face, but want to ensure smooth access.