Will men’s neckties ever make a comeback?
As my colleague Guy Trebay, our men’s wear critic, said when I asked him about ties, “It never pays to sound the death knell in fashion since even the most seemingly defunct articles of clothing have a way of rising from the dead, and this is particularly so in men’s wear, where the repertoire is limited and largely based on centuries-old customs.”
Every generation, it seems, has a way of “discovering” items of dress that previous generations dismissed in triumph, recontextualizing them and claiming them for its own, like anthropologists unearthing buried treasures. Indeed, there is a difference between a garment becoming a novelty item and a garment being a standard part of a wardrobe, and that, I think, is what we are talking about here.
The tie as a de facto part of everyday dressing, like underwear, is probably a thing of the past. It has been quietly losing ground for years, between the advent of casual Fridays, the general blurring of lines between our personal and professional lives, and the working-from-home days of the pandemic.
Derek Guy, a.k.a., @dieworkwear, told me that the owner of one high-end men’s clothing store told him that he “considers his necktie displays now to be part of the shop’s décor, like bars that display antique liquor ads or paper currencies now defunct.”
That doesn’t mean the tie is necessarily the vestigial tail of men’s wear (at least not yet). As one door closes, another opens. It is possible that the demise of the tie as a standard part of dress could mean the rise of the tie as an optional accessory to signify individuality (for any gender), not to mention it would make it even more effective in underscoring the formality of an occasion.
To that end, I expect the tie will probably experience blips in popularity according to fashion. Alexandra Van Houtte of the fashion search engine Tagwalk noted that 4 percent of the looks in the spring 2024 men’s shows included a tie, which sounds low, except that figure is 3 percent more than the spring shows the year before. Mr. Guy also said, “I suspect that in another 10 or 20 years, the tie will be like a woman’s wedding dress.” Which is to say, a special event-only garment, a relic of tradition and redolent with historical meaning, but not relevancy.
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