Fit to Be Untied: Neckties may be on the way to fashion limbo

Credit: AP Photo

Once upon a time, the United States was a nation of necktie-wearers. Now, just 6 percent of men wear a tie to work every day.

By: JournalNow Staff | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 15, 2008

NEW YORK

They were the best of ties. They were the worst of ties.

Skinny little beatnik ties and mod doublewide ties. Suave and sophisticated Frank Sinatra ties and greedy Gordon Gekko power ties. Bar Mitzvah-boy clip-on ties and Jerry Garcia trippin' ties.

And, of course, all those closet doors decked with millions of gifted ties.

But now, with another Father's Day upon us, comes word that the necktie -- that elongated swatch of silk or polyester or rayon whose donning has long marked a male rite of passage while serving no discernible utility -- may be fading into the fashion sunset.

The recent decision by the Men's Dress Furnishings Association -- the trade group for America's neckwear-makers -- to shut down has some folks tied up in knots. A calendar crammed with casual Fridays (and Mondays and Thursdays ...) has exacted its last, grim toll, some said.

In an age in which some people show up for job interviews in flip-flops, the imminent death of the tie seems plausible.

It's been a good, long time, after all, since America was a nation of necktie wearers.

Look back at pictures from the Great Depression, and you'll see men who put on ties before taking their place on soup lines. The stands at baseball games were once filled with men in ties -- even on weekends. In the years after World War II, when employers created thousands of new office jobs, the sidewalks of downtowns across the country were thronged by men whose necks were cloaked in soldierly stripes and solids.

It's clear that the tie, once the very symbol of the male establishment, is far from the icon it used to be.

And, given the fickleness of fashion and the fact that some occasions still demand a tie, it's probably too soon to write its epitaph.

Predictions of the necktie's demise have been circulating for years. In the mid-1990s, designer Gianni Versace offered his vision of male fashion in a coffee-table book titled Men Without Ties, a sure sign of where things were headed.

The burgeoning popularity of casual Fridays turned khakis and open-collar-shirts into suitable wear for workplaces previously better suited to suits. The dot-com boom filled thousands of instant offices with laid-back twentysomethings who saw no point in lashing something tight around their necks.

But rumors of the tie's death are about equivalent to the longtime predictions that the computer would soon turn society paperless. There's a lot of truth to the prognostication, but somehow it hasn't quite turned out that way.

Clearly, the tie business is nothing like in the old days. In the early 1970s, when sales peaked, manufacturers sold 200 million to 250 million ties a year in the U.S. Today, annual sales have dropped to about 50 million, according to Lee Terrill, the president of the neckwear division of Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., the nation's largest tie-maker.

A Gallup poll last year found that just 6 percent of men wear neckties to work each day, down from 10 percent in 2002. More than two-thirds of the men surveyed said they never wear a tie to work, up from 59 percent five years earlier.

In the past 10 or 15 years, as dress codes loosened, men who had always worn ties "were making a statement. I'm not going to wear a tie because I don't have to wear a tie," Terrill says. "But now so many people don't wear a tie, that it's a statement to wear one."