George McCracken doesn't have to wear a tie. A 25-year-old painter in Manhattan who works in store design and display to pay the bills, McCracken is a member of that lucky group who can wear just about anything they please to work. But McCracken does wear a tie.
"I don't ever wear a collared shirt without one," he says. "It started when I had a job where I had to wear a jacket and tie, but after I left I started wearing it anyway, out with friends, as an informal thing. It just felt comfortable."
And McCracken is not alone. Check out any art gallery, advertising agency or bar where the cool kids hang. Look at Justin Timberlake, Adam Brody, Elijah Wood or any other young actor who presumably is not also holding down a desk job.
Tie sales may have foundered in the decade or more since the words "casual Friday" entered men's vocabularies, but in the past year or two, stylish men in their 20s and early 30s have embraced the old four-in-hand as a style statement - that is, as long as it is an optional one.
Even with tie sales among older age groups uniformly down, sales to men aged 18 to 34 were up more than 13 per cent, to $US343 million ($390 million) from $303 million, between March 2006 and March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks clothing sales and trends.
"There's no question that there has been a dramatic increase among younger guys, who are age 18 to 34, expressing themselves by dressing up," says Marshal Cohen, the chief retail analyst at NPD. "He's not hesitating, given the option, to grab a tie and a fancy tie at that."
This is a newsflash that will either amuse or dismay men in their 40s and 50s, who, after years of wearing a tie to work, finally won the right to hang up the old choke chain. But this is no ordinary tie. A far cry from the power ties in aggressively coloured and printed silk twill that defined the 1980s, the defiantly low-key tie of today is destined for dress-up Thursday as well as casual Friday.
It may be made of wool, cashmere, silk knit or glove leather; cut a pointedly skinny six centimetres wide; woven in plaid or printed with an unorthodox pattern of skulls with bunny ears. It may boast a trendy label such as Alexander Olch. Slightly offbeat in a laidback way, the youthful tie is giving the old dress code a shot in the neck.
"It's a uniform that doesn't look like a uniform," says Daniel Pipski, 31, a senior executive at LivePlanet, the Los Angeles production company whose founders include Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. In Hollywood, where the open-collar dress shirt is king, the tie is largely held to be a benighted relic of east coast business style.
That has not deterred Pipski, however. He sees the tie as a kind of style passkey, especially the slender wool 1950s-style ties created by the Los Angeles label Band of Outsiders. To him, ties are both a bit of self-expression and a concession to business dress.
"Wearing a tie is a kind of style," he says. "It's a thing you're doing. It's seen as 'creative'. So you can go from meetings with the creative side and then go meet the head of a studio."
Labelling these ties creative may seem odd considering how restrained they are compared with the gimmicky "creative" ties of the mid-1990s, which were adorned with cartoon characters, beer logos and the like. Lighthearted as they were, they did little to keep the tie close to any man's heart.
Then the combination of casual Friday and the dot-com explosion appeared to condemn the tie to the style gallows. The number of ties sold in the United States, which reached a peak of 110 million in the early 1990s, fell to 60 million in 2001, says Gerald Andersen, the director of the Men's Dress Furnishings Association (which until 2001 was called the Neckwear Association of America).
The change of name, and focus, makes some sense: NPD reports that for the year ending March 2007, tie sales were down to 44 million. The tie's renaissance had its roots in fashion, sparked by designers such as Thom Browne and former Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane, who made it a part of their collections.
It was not long before bands such as the Strokes were casting off that late-1990s frayed indie-rock look for sharp black suits and matching skinny ties. In keeping with the trend, sportswear lines such as Club Monaco now sell ties, a break from the casual ethos on which they were founded. Tie sales have definitely edged up at Bloomingdale's, and Kevin Harter, the menswear director, credits the increase to younger men.
"They're using them as fashion statements, with suits or with jeans," he says. He now displays ties with denim and sportswear instead of just in the tie department.
At Saks Fifth Avenue, sales have increased into the low double digits during the past year, says Michael Macko, the men's fashion director, who similarly attributes the rise to the young men buying ties. Even a few men outside the 18- to 34-year-old demographic have taken a shine to the tie.
"It's been a while since I actually wanted to wear a tie," says Trey Laird, 43, of New York advertising firm Laird & Partners. "But I've been feeling it myself as well as seeing it on a lot of the younger guys in the office. It wasn't any one thing that did it. You get bored of the same look and as much as I like jeans and a blazer, it gets boring after a few years."
Or as McCracken, the painter, puts it: "Just like you could point to a time, like when Tom Ford was at Gucci, that it became uncool to wear a tie, now it just feels like wearing a tie is the more punk thing to do." Indeed, with Ford up to his old chest-hair-baring tricks in the ad campaign for his new cologne, it does seem time for a new look. Would a tie kill the guy?
At least Ford, with his shirt unbuttoned down to the netherlands, miraculously never suffers from the great blight that affects so many tieless men: collar wilt - that is, its gradual collapse (or migration underneath the jacket collar) as the day wears on.
Any man who derides the tie as solely a decorative accessory would do well to remember that it serves an important function in holding a look together. It's too soon to tell if the tie will come back as a mandatory presence or if its new allure will be transitory. But while it is a smart, easy way to look cool and professional, there is at least one rub.
Sean Safford, 34, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has rediscovered the tie's allure and has even mastered the Windsor knot.
"The problem is that all the dress shirts I got over the years to wear without ties don't really work with them," he says. "Buying new shirts to go with the new ties gets expensive." Welcome to the Fashion School of Economics, Mr Safford.
New York Times
