A decade or so ago, I put on a tie and have been fighting to tear it off ever since. I want to believe that the tie speaks of some higher purpose: grander than making an office worker feel, every waking second of every working day, that he is an indentured and half-choked peon; nobler than recording in synthetic fibres the shaving gashes, flicked ink or spilled mayonnaise of clerical life; less vulgar than making every full-windsor, small-knot or four-in-hand a claim to social superiority; less lethal than providing a ready-made noose waiting for industrial machinery or roadside mishaps to play hangman.
The tie serves no useful purpose. It is at best a questionable adornment, at worst a social garrotte. Yet a tie can look chic, even to my hostile eyes. It is arguably no more irrational than any aspect of fashion. Arbitrary choices are offered to us and we embrace the ones that make us feel part of something, or apart from everything. Such choices should, however, involve challenging convention and the tie has had it too easy for too long.
Even accepting the notion that a tie can set off formal attire nicely, how often in practice does a tie look good or sit comfortably? Does anything look less kempt than a cheap and badly thrown together suit and tie? Many of my colleagues would look a good deal smarter in their spouses' nightwear, with or without undergarments. Given that many British tie-wearers rarely meet the public, and work in concrete boxes whose temperatures range from warm to the melting point of lead, why are they buttoned up to the jugular? Does some dark agent of convention believe we should suffer for his art?
To use an example close to my heart, the police service is still contorting itself over how to shoehorn the tie into the real world. In the twenty-first century, some senior officers believe their troops should be as impractically attired as the ones Wellington sent marching in immaculate ranks across the fields of Waterloo. So, while some specialist officers are allowed to wear polo shirts and workwear trousers, all neat, practical and of a piece with their armour, boots and assorted weaponry, the rank and file are less fortunate. They have to coordinate polyester trousers, white shirts and clip-on ties with their kevlar and leather. The shirt quickly becomes a sweat-sodden mess, the tie squeezes the adam's apple like a vengeful thumb, and the cheap trousers do their best to split, tear and reveal the officer's intimate preferences if he is called upon to do anything more practical than ordering a kebab in a standing position. I confess I'm speaking from experience. It's not that senior officers are ignorant of health and safety issues: if the thermometer starts to bubble, ties may be dispensed with, making the ensemble both scruffy and incomplete.
Media archetypes don't help. From Philip Marlowe to James Bond, celluloid bruisers give life to the lie that you can fight off multiple agents of evil with a ready made slipknot in place. To be fair, the tie can be expressive: in any detective fiction worth its salt, the nature of the hero's marriage, substance-dependency or attitude to those fat-assed pen-pushers at city-hall can be read in the correctness or disarray of the rag around his throat.
Perhaps vascular restriction is a feminist issue. After centuries of domestic thraldom in whale-bone girdles and inch-thick petticoats, is it only right and fair that women should see male fashion remain trapped in the nineteenth century? That men should pace the floors of offices, buttoned up in wool-blend and polyester purdah, while their female cohorts clack across the same floors in flip flops, airy blouses and whatever they please as long as it isn't denim.
There could be truth in any of this, but none of it matters. The tie stands for unthinking convention and has no more to do with small practicalities or eternal verities than most of our working lives do. It nicely symbolises the fact that most of us have to embrace the ludicrous and unnatural just to make a living. If only it could do its symbolising more comfortably. Perhaps the day of the all-cotton, one-size-fits-none, fake-tie t-shirt is at hand.
