This an item I started on something called International Necktie Day, which is in October. I didn't finish then, and even though I thought about timing it to automatically post on that date when it rolls back around, I decided just to go ahead and post it.
There is probably no piece of apparel that is more useless than the necktie. They are at best a nuisance and at worst uncomfortable, and they always have been. And yet, they're a standard part of business and formal dress, and probably because we're used to them, under certain circumstances men look odd without them, even now while they are clearly in decline.
Store display, with hand holding the tie with some trepidation, much the way many younger men do today.
Those circumstances are becoming less and less common, however.
The origin of the necktie, in my view, is obscure. I've read it attributed to 17th Century Croatian mercenaries and to fox hunters more recently. Whatever its origins, by the late 19th Century they'd become pretty much standard for any sort of formal dress, and indeed by the early 20th Century pretty much any man who wasn't doing manual labor, and some who were, were wearing them.
Man manufacturing neckties, as a cottage industry, in New York, in 1912.
When exactly they became so standard isn't entirely clear to me, but it they were around in analogous form and use as early as the mid 19th Century. Suits of that period were not exactly the same as they would be later, and the frock coat and morning coat were quite common at the time for regular formal wear as they had not yet evolved into species of tuxedos. The bow tie, in a little bulkier form, was quite common, but then so was the conventional necktie as well. If they do not look quite the same it's because suits, not so much ties, had not evolved into their present form.
The "lounge suit", which is oddly enough what the current business suit was originally called, made its appearance in the mid 19th Century, but nobody really knows the full story of it. It hit in Europe before the United States, but even here in the mid 19th Century it was around. And it was part of a slow trend in men's wear where the somewhat informal has evolved into the formal. Military uniforms, which will be dealt with elsewhere, very much demonstrate this trend, but business suits have followed it. Originally the lounge suit was simply a suit that was to be less formal that something like a morning coat, so you could wear it in the evenings. But it quickly supplanted the bulkier frock coat and morning coat and became standard men's wear.
The victorious heads of state following World War One. The man in the suit is Italian Vittoria Orlando, showing that, truly, the Italians have always been on the cutting edge of fashion.
And with them, of course, you always wore a tie.
By the mid 19th Century, ties were basically required for office work. You simply do not find instances of men working in offices who were not wearing them. I doubt very much you'd find a decently dressed man in an office by the 1880s, who was lacking a tie.
And with that came the requirement, basically, to wear them anywhere you weren't doing manual labor. And indeed, I suspect the spread in part as an effort to show that you weren't doing manual labor. Ties became necessary for any many who was half way well off if he was going to be doing pretty much anything that was physical labor. And certainly, if he was going out for a night on the town, or courting, or whatever, he was going to be wearing a suit and tie.
By the early 20th Century they'd become so amazingly standard that they even appeared in costumes we would not expect. Soldiers started being issued neckties by the early 20th Century, but you wouldn't generally see them in the field with them until the 1930s in the U.S. Army, even though U.S. soldiers were issued ties to be worn with their shirts (under their service coats) prior to World War One. U.S. officers, as opposed to the enlisted men, were routinely wearing shirt and tie by the time the U.S. entered Mexico in the Punitive Expedition
U.S. officers during the Punitive Expedition. If you look carefully you can see that Col. Herbert J. Slocum, on the left, is wearing a tie.
In the British Army, they start showing up field applications with officers during World War One, as amazing, and inappropriate, as that seems.
British soldiers, World War One
Indeed, wearing a tie in combat is, truly, foolish. But it was becoming common, at least in the officer class, by regulation. No doubt to signal that they were gentlemen. But at least in some armies, at the same time, ties were issued universally to enlisted men as well, who might nor might not be seen wearing them in field conditions. Almost as foolish, I suppose, was the spread of ties to policemen, many of whom still wear one.
White House policeman, 1929.
But they'd become just generally common with even people who had outdoor occupations, unless seemingly conditions simply precluded it.
William Fox, Underwood Photo News Service, official
photographer with the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Mexico 1916. While otherwise outfitted for rough service, and to ride, he's wearing a tie.
And so it was throughout the mid 20th Century. Even as late as 1943 one legendary U.S. general, Gen. Patton, attempted to have his men wear ties while serving in combat in North Africa, although the effort failed and even Patton conceded that point.
Patton wearing a modified B3 flight jacket with pockets and elbow patches added. If we could see his collar, he'd be wearing a tie. He attempted to require his enlisted men to do so in North Africa, but the effort failed. You can bet, however, that at least senior officers not immediately in combat, if serving with Patton, were wearing ties.
Now, at some point this very obviously changed. Go into any office today, including professional offices, and there's a pretty good chance that the men working there are not wearing ties. Some may, and probably will be, but this is less and less true all the time. What happened.
Maybe its easier to start not with what, but when ,and go from there. And on this, I'm pretty sure that quite a few people would link it to the turbulent changes of the 1960s. But I tend to think that isn't wholly correct, although it partially may be.
I think tie wearing started to actually decline in one of the eras we associate the most with ties, the 1930s.
If you look through photos of the 1930s, it seems to me that it had become acceptable for men not to wear ties in some settings where they just had been as recently as the 1920s. And I think that the Great Depression brought that about.
The 1920s was the high water mark of tie wearing. Men were wearing them everywhere you could, and in nearly every occupation that existed. In the 1930s that slacked up a bit. It's easy to see why, to a degree. The Great Depression made an extra useless piece of silk extra useless. But beyond that, the tie probably just didn't mean quite as much as it once did for some of the reasons we addressed back in this post:
This blog notes, as we've stated many times before, changes over
history. Specifically, it supposedly looks at the 1890 to about 1920
time frame, but we also frankly hardly ever stick to that. Oh well.
Business
men (lawyers) in the early 20th Century. These men aren't dressed up,
they would have been dressed in this fashion every day. Given the
boater style hat worn by the man on the left, this photograph must have
been taken in summer.
As we noted there:
In an earlier era, when every vocation was more "real", if you will, or
rather perhaps when more men worked in manual vocations, there was
little interest in fanciful dress. For those who worked in town, at one
time they desire seemed to be to show that they'd achieved an indoor
status. Indeed, some have noted that the standards of dress remained
remarkably high in the 1920s and 1930s, first when many Americans
started moving off of farms and into the cities, and secondly during the
Great Depression, as that was the way of showing that you'd overcome
your past. The standards then carried on until they had a reason, or at
least there was some sort of cause, or lack of a reason to change.
I think every bit of that is true, but that it applied a little more in the 1920s than in the 1930s. And while clothing standards were very high in the 1930s, in spite of the economic crisis, there was also just a little more slack, but just a little, on tie wearing. Not much, but some.
After World War Two that carried on, and the tie declined first in the military, where it had been one of the late entrants. At the start of World War Two the U.S. Army was theoretically requiring ties for field use. By mid war it clearly was not, and that was all gone by the end of the war. In the post war era ties became less and less common with military wear in general, until they were really something associated with fairly formal wear in the Army, but more common in the Marine Corps, the latter of which is more formal in general. As an example, during World War Two we find generals typically wearing ties no matter where they were. By Vietnam, they were wearing the same field uniforms that combat infantrymen were if they were in a combat theater.
Still, ties kept on for office wear in strength in the 1950s and really up into the 1970s and the decline really can be associated with the 1960s. In the late 1960s menswear reacted to the clothing changes going on with young men and suits and ties became really funky. That change didn't last all that long and it was soon followed by quite a few men just abandoning ties and suits in general. And who can blame them. Nobody really wants to wear a fat flowered tie and a polyester suit, so the death of the standard soon followed the standard's modification. I can remember it occurring. My father, when I was a kid, wore a sports coat (itself a relaxed standard) and a tie down to his dental office everyday. The tie was a clip on which itself is a concession to not liking ties but needing to. In older photos of him in the late 50s, however, he wore a suit. By the mid 1970s the ties were no longer being worn by dentist generally and the sports coats went as well. The standard had changed.
And it continues to.
When I started practicing law in 1990 ties remained very common for male lawyers. Now, most days nobody wears a tie unless they are going to court or have something formal going on. As recently as about five years ago or so ties remained standard for depositions, but now I often find myself being the only lawyer at a deposition with a tie. A real change has occurred.
