The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Tie one on: a brief history of neckties

I've always hated neckties. They're a good way to stay hot in the summer, they tend to fall in your soup or spaghetti, they get dirty and they're hard to clean, and in my opinion they don't add much to male attire. They seem such a useless bit of haberdashery, the present for he who has everything and wants nothing. Yet they continue to flood in at holiday time, hawked by merchants whose markup must be large.

Thinking of all this and with Christmas just having passed, I thought I'd look into the history of the necktie. Much of what I am about to relate is the result of a not very deep study, and a good deal of the study comes from a Web page on the Internet maintained by Michael J. Landman, who is associated with Cal Tech.

Mr. Landman's researches indicate that no one quite knows where the necktie came from. There's some evidence that it originated in China--like almost everything else in civilization.

Some historians also apparently hold ancient Egypt in some favor, but what's more likely is that no one really knows where the necktie came from or who the first man to wrap some cloth around his neck may have been.

It's also interesting to note that the necktie, again for reasons unclear, seems to go through a kind of cyclical modification. For a while it is wide; then it becomes thin, only to widen again.

In the French Revolution neckties were taken to be a sign of aristocracy. They fell into disfavor for a time because wearing one tended to separate one's neck and head from one's body. The revolutionists, however, decided they needed a neck piece of their own and took to wearing a large red neck cloth sometimes 15 feet long which you could wrap around your neck and (curses) tie with a knot so it wouldn't come loose.

So, apparently, was born the necktie knot, something every boy child used to learn from his father as a badge of manhood, only to have it retaught to him by his wife. Where wives learned how to tie neckties is unclear, but it was probably out of necessity when their husbands intentionally forgot.

For a while the Russians, spurred on by being comrades, also considered neckties a sign of class distinction in a supposedly classless society--Stalin, for instance, seems not to have worn one--but eventually at least the bureaucrats in the Soviet Union affected ties.

Americans, according to Mr. Landman, wore bandanna handkerchiefs before they became an accepted part of cowboy attire in this country, and eventually these useful clothes shrank to become the ties we know (and, at least on my part, hate) today.

Just why the present, almost universal, four-in-hand knot used to throttle the males of America came to be tied the way it is now is not very clear, but probably the knot arrived at its present shape and form because it is adjustable and yet can be maintained tightly. (We are excluding, of course, bow ties, which aren't worn much in the United States anymore, and not saying much about the black string ties worn by, among others, Southern senators in days gone by, or the bolos of the Southwest, which aren't really ties but jewelry--at least in my view.)

The father of the modern American tie, according to Mr. Landsman, is one Jesse Langsdorf, who patented the all-weather, wrinkle-free tie in 1920, a time beyond the ken of most males now living. Ties are at present a disappearing item of clothing, especially here in Silicon Valley, where those in the computer industry tend to opt for jeans, polo shirts and no ties at all. More power to them, I say. Mr. Landsman, however, who likes ties, contends the tie will come back. He has charted the rise and fall of women's skirts--another phenomenon worth researching--and finds there is a relationship between the two. Ties seems to widen as women's skirts gets shorter. Why? Your guess is apparently as good as anyone else's.

Anyway, if you got a tie for Christmas--and thankfully I did not--you can now wear it in the full knowledge of how that came to be. But keep a careful eye on women's skirts. If their hemlines start to rise you're likely to be in the market for a newer and wider piece of cloth to put around your neck. But not mine.

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