Ties are pleasant to look at. They are colorful, they come in a peculiar shape, and are covered with a great variety of designs. In windy weather, they will sometimes hover in the air in front of you as you are walking before slapping you in the face. (This is uncomfortable for you, but at least it provides some amusement for onlookers.) They are, without a doubt, the strangest item in the male business suit. What do they do? You can use your pockets to put pens in, you put your coat on when it's cold, and a sturdy pair of business shoes will protect your feet from both the cold and rubbish on the ground. But ties? As clothes go, they are redundant. Their only purpose seems to be to identify the wearer as male; in that sense, they are vaguely phallic.
There is little hope for the tie. It is a dying creature. People of the present day are relentlessly informal - they never use a polite word when a swear word will do: and no-one would wear a tie if they did not have to. The tie has been starting to die out especially with Generation Y.
In the last 50 years, the tie has gone through many turbulent changes. The salaried corporate man is actually a newer invention and the uniform chosen for the white-collar worker was just that, white shirt and the mentioned tie. In the 50s, most men in “real jobs” wore ties, even at home for dinner and during weekends.
Then the Sergeant Pepper generation challenged everything, including the tie. And throughout the 80s and 90s, the tie went through both strong following and equally strong anti-sentiment, symbolizing a great debate regarding conformity, expectation and self-expression.
Generation X raised the novel idea that what you thought was important, not how you looked. Since that view o ...