The Lost Art Of Wearing A Tie

When I was in school, I used to spend a small, deliberate portion of every morning standing before the bedroom mirror, working my school tie into a knot. I wasn’t very good at it honestly. I would get scolded by my father everyday for a haphazard knot that wasn’t centred at all. But I do remember how I felt every day as I walked into school wearing it: I felt cool, I felt like an adult. I felt like my father who had stepped out to achieve something.

I think about that mirror a lot these days, because somewhere between the dot-com boom and the pandemic Zoom call, the tie eventually disappeared. It didn’t disappear abruptly, or was knocked into the bin and labelled as one of those sad little items that were uncool anymore. It just died out, steadily, like a language children never learn to speak. Walk into any office today, even one full of men in expensive suits, and you’ll notice an open collar. The open collar is everywhere. Silicon Valley made it a status symbol. Tech billionaires weaponized it. And the rest of the world, grateful to be released from what many considered a decorative noose, followed without a second thought.

But what exactly have we shed? A piece of cloth? A corporate obligation? Or something more?

The Battle That Started Everything

The story of the necktie does not begin on a Paris runway or in a Savile Row atelier. It begins, improbably, on a battlefield.

The year was 1618, and Europe was tearing itself apart in the war. Among the fighters hired by the French Crown were Croatian mercenaries — known in their own language as Hravat — who wore knotted pieces of cloth around their necks. Practical, yes, for keeping shirt collars closed and soaking up sweat in the summer heat.

Legend has it that Croatian wives tied these scarves around the necks of their husbands before battle, watching from the hillsides above as the men fought in the valleys below.

When these soldiers arrived at the French court of King Louis XIII, the monarch was immediately captivated. He called the neckcloth a cravate — a Frenchification of Croate, meaning Croat — and within a royal decree, it became mandatory dress at court gatherings. The French did what the French have always done with a good idea borrowed from someone else: they took it, made it more beautiful, and convinced the world it was their own. By the late 17th century, the cravat had crossed the Channel into England, reached the courts of Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and entered the vocabulary of every European language. In French it is cravate. In German, Krawatte. In Spanish, corbata.

For the record, Croatia celebrates World Cravat Day every October 18th. In 2003, to mark the occasion, they wrapped the world's largest tie — 808 metres long, 25 metres wide — around the Roman amphitheatre in Pula. If you're going to claim credit for an invention, that's how you do it.

Portrait of four unidentied Freemasons at an International Congress of 33rd Degree Masons, Washington DC, 1912. Getty Images

The Person Who Changed Everything

For a century, the cravat evolved in the hands of European aristocracy — growing wider, more elaborate, made of silk and lace, fastened in knots so intricate they required assistance from a servant. It was gorgeous and maddening in equal measure. Then George Bryan Brummell arrived.

Beau Brummell was not an aristocrat. He was a middle-class man of taste and intelligence who became the most influential figure in early 19th-century British fashion. His genius was in restraint. While other men dressed in powdered wigs, embroidered waistcoats, and silk stockings in rainbow colours, Brummell stripped everything back: dark, clean suits, immaculate white linen, and a simple tied cravat.

By 1818, the obsession had reached such proportions that a satirical pamphlet titled Neckclothitania was published, cataloguing the various cravat knots men were attempting: The Mathematical, The American, The Irish, The Mail Coach. And buried inside its pages — the very first use of the word "tie" to describe a neckcloth. By 1840, the word "cravat" had been almost entirely replaced in common speech. The tie had a name.

The Formal Invention

For all its sartorial evolution, the tie you wore to your last job interview is, structurally, the invention of one man: Jesse Langsdorf, a New York tailor, who on April 12, 1922 filed for a patent that would change menswear forever. By cutting tie fabric on the bias — at a 45-degree diagonal to the weave — rather than along the grain, Langsdorf created a tie that fell cleanly from the knot without bunching or twisting. He then sewed it in three segments, adding an elastic slip stitch along the back that allowed it to spring back into shape after every knotting.

The "Langsdorf tie" became the standard virtually overnight.

The 20th century turned the tie into a cultural barometer.

Take the Windsor Knot. Named after Edward VIII, the knot is wide, symmetrical. The Duke himself denied inventing it, claiming he merely preferred thicker fabrics that gave his four-in-hand the illusion of a fuller knot. But the paparazzi, in their frenzy to document the most romantic scandal of the century, photographed his perfect knot for front pages around the world, and the name stuck. The knot became a piece of royal mythology. So enduring is its association with authority that Ian Fleming's James Bond considered a man who wore a Windsor knot to be fundamentally untrustworthy.

Winston Churchill preferred the bow tie — specifically his navy silk with white polka dots, which came to be known as the "Blenheim" after the palace of his birth. During the darkest years of World War II, that bow tie appeared in every photograph, every speech, every moment of national crisis. It became inseparable from the idea of British resolve. Churchill and Roosevelt formed what some historians have called a "bow tie alliance" — two men in dots and bows against Hitler's four-in-hand.

Photo of Frank SINATRA; posed, next to microphone, recording at Columbia Recording studios, Liederkrantz HallGetty Images

Frank Sinatra wore his tie loosened, rakishly undone, the knot dropped an inch below the collar.

The 1950s gave us the skinny tie — a response to wartime shortages of fabric, some say, and an expression of the new austerity and clean modernism that decade hungered for. The 1960s sharpened it further: thin ties, slim suits, the whole aesthetic compressed into something tight and pointed. The 1970s then let it all breathe again, massively, spectacularly — kipper ties the width of a small country, patterns so loud they were almost a form of aggression. Ralph Lauren pushed the four-in-wide trend. It was an era that wore its excesses on its chest, literally.

Then came the 1980s power tie. Wall Street wore them. Politicians wore them. Anchors on news broadcasts wore them.

Winston ChurchillWikipedia

The Death Of The Tie

It started quietly in Palo Alto in the 1960s, when Hewlett-Packard allowed engineers to ditch their suits on Fridays. Simultaneously, the Hawaiian Fashion Guild was distributing floral shirts to government employees in Hawaii, hoping to boost local textile sales. These two small acts of sartorial rebellion planted a seed. By the early 1990s, Levi's subsidiary Dockers had published a quietly influential pamphlet called "The Guide to Business Casual" — a guide that was, conveniently, full of Dockers products.

Evetually, the hoodie became a status symbol. The jeans became a power move. And the tie? The tie became a punchline.

Then the pandemic arrived and removed what remained of the question. Men working from home in front of cameras needed to look professional from the chest up, and nobody needed a tie. Not one Zoom call in the history of the pandemic was made better by a Windsor knot. When offices reopened, the casual dress codes held. The tie, for most white-collar workers, simply never came back. When Biden, Obama, and Clinton appeared together at a 2024 fundraiser in Midtown Manhattan — formal suits, no ties — fashion historians noted it as a cultural moment. If American presidents weren't tying up at a Manhattan event, who was?

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Here is where I want to be careful, because there is a version of this argument that is just nostalgia. Men were not nobler or wiser or more principled when they wore ties. The boardrooms of the 1950s and 1960s, full of men in beautiful suits and perfect knots, were also full of men who would not hire women or people of colour, who smoked at their desks and drank at lunch and came home to families they'd barely met. A tie never made anyone good.

But what the tie represented — at its best, not its worst — was the idea that presentation is a form of respect. That walking into a room and having put thought into how you appear tells the room something. The tie was never about the cloth. It was about the deliberateness.

Oscar Wilde wrote in 1893 that a well-tied tie was the first serious step in life. And where was the lie? There was seriousness in the act.

Now, the ties I gifted my father hang in the closet, waiting for a TikTok trend to revive it. We still see it from time to time – on the ramp, at the red carpet, as a style statement. But never in the boardrooms.