Last time I used a tie was one of my local pub’s birthday parties. They used to have these parties on 1st of January and I did attend them. When they had costume party as the theme I bought a blue tie. Donned my black trousers, shirt, socks and shoes and put on the blue tie. When I entered the premises all my friends started to laugh but more stranger people started to ask why I was not in a costume. IIRC it was the bartender who shouted out that don’t you see: Topi is not a facist but dressed as one.
LOL, I gave my husband one of those sets in Oct 2019. He hasn’t opened it yet since he was working from home for almost a year. Nice color coordination, which helps since he’s partly color blind.
The last time I bought a tie new, back in 2003 or so, it was from a souvenir shop, and 100% silk, and still only cost 13€ (this at a time when the euro and dollar were almost equal).
The vast majority of my ties are used, most often from Volunteers of America.
I had to attend a dress-up meeting of sorts a while back. I checked in my closet and found I had left all my dress shirts at my northern estate. I went to my regular source for such items. I left the (thrift) store with two silk ties, a nice white L.L. Bean oxford shirt, and two Revereware copper bottom stock pots. It all cost $7 before tax.
Just for fun, I looked up the original prices of the shirt and tie. I found the tie (a Zegna) goes for $195 new and the shirt for $60.
For certain things there’s just no reason to buy new!
I still have the very nice Wembley, etc. ties that I found in thrift stores when I was a teenager. They still look good and fashionable, even tho some are over 60 years old now.
With those prices, I’m going to reconsider bolo ties. Maybe I can dig out an object for the slider that would be emblematic of my profession and make my own.
Coders used to wear ties - I started in corporate America in 1982 (damn, that was a long time ago) and all the men were in at least a tie, and usually had their suit coat with them (and sometimes three-piece suits and/or suspenders).
I don’t remember when we started to rebel on the (mostly unofficial) dress code (late 80’s maybe?), but a high point was when a district manager (boss’s boss) threw a fit about the “mail guy is better dressed then the managers/programmers!”. Said mail guy had read the book about “dress for the job you want” - I don’t know that it ever worked for him, but kudos for trying I guess.
I went to Catholic high school and ties were required for days when we had Mass. If you didn’t have a tie, you had to buy one from the Dean for $1. He had a box of terrible ties recovered (mostly, I think) from end-of-the-year locker cleanouts. Most guys just kept the same one tied in their locker year after year.
Similarly, collared shirts were required every day but you could wear a tshirt or hoody over it. So we’d cut the collar off a thrift store shirt to make a dickey for under our favorite band’s concert shirt of whatever.
At my Catholic high school, ties were required every day, and you couldn’t wear anything but school spirit-wear over your dress shirt. But the only requirement about the ties in the dress code was that they not be “necktie simulations” (i.e., clip-ons), and they had to be “in good taste”. So, naturally, being teenage boys, we competed on who could wear the ugliest tie.
Catholic high school graduate here, as well. We had to wear a collared shirt, tie, and sportcoat or suit coat every day. The standard practice, at the beginning of the school year, was to either (a) raid one’s father’s closet for a tie or two, and/or (b) go to Goodwill or the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store, and buy an old sportcoat and a tie.
We did have a lot of guys who found very ugly coats and/or ties; I can distinctly remember the guy with the blaze orange sportcoat. I spent my entire junior year wearing a tie which had undoubtedly once been part of a work uniform at a Hardee’s restaurant – it was a black tie, with tiny little Hardee’s logos.
You then kept the tie and the jacket in your locker, and put them on every morning when you got to school. Teenaged boys being teenaged boys, the jackets and ties became pretty nasty by the end of the school year (food stains, torn fabric, getting written on, etc.), and most of them wound up in the garbage can in June.
Our dress code wasn’t too bad: no jeans, collared shirt, no hair below the collar or facial hair. There were religious exceptions like for the couple of Sikh guys.
We had that rule, too – hair could be no longer than the top of your shirt collar, and the only facial hair allowed was sideburns, which could not extend past the bottom of your earlobes.
I think Rush Limbaugh started this nonsense. He wore the multi-colored ties. Before that it was a solid color. His brand of ties sold in stores in the mid-90s for $30. I remember being absolutely shocked at that price. Who in the hell would pay $30 for such an ugly tie? But in about 5 months everyone was wearing them.
My school allowed facial hair, so long as it was “tidy and well-maintained”, or some such, but very few of us were able to pull that off (let’s face it, most teenage boys’ facial hair is pretty scruffy), so most of us shaved (besides which, the very fact of shaving was, at the time, considered a rite of passage).
And I really hope that it wasn’t Limbaugh who started the trend of multicolored ties, because I’d hate to be grateful to him for anything.
Limbaugh might have encouraged expensive multicolored ties, but non-solids were definitely around earlier. My father wore ties to work every day and I remember him wearing striped and paisley ties in the 60s and 70s, usually maroon or navy with some white or beige, and the younger men in his office had ties with more colorful prints.
Multi-colored ties, often in abstract patterns, were definitely popular in the '90s; I was wearing a tie to work every day in the early '90s, and I had a big collection of such ties. Bob Greene (a columnist with the Chicago Tribune) referred to that style as “dog vomit ties.” I didn’t realize that Rush Limbaugh pushed them, but then, I also paid as little attention as possible to him.
Here are a couple of examples of that style:
Regardless, I agree that stripes, paisley patterns, etc., were popular long before the '90s.
I also remember that, in the late '80s and early '90s, the single-colored tie (sometimes with a pattern of little dots, and usually in red or yellow) was often referred to as the “power tie,” and a certain New York real estate developer of questionable ethics wore them all the time.
