Sometimes, when looking at old photos, I’ll see men wearing suits with ties that only go about half way down their shirt. In modern times, that’s a fashion faux pas; your tie should come down to your belt buckle. Wearing it short makes you look uncool.
But was it ever fashionable to wear a short tie? It doesn’t seem to be a universal thing, just something i notice occasionally in old pictures. Are these the fashion failures of yesteryear, or was it just a different standard back then?
ETA: here’s an example. Note the guy on the far left. That’s so short as to be a deliberate choice, in my opinion (whereas the other two men with shortish ties look to be aiming for the typical belt length, even if they were off in their measuring the length of the tying). But was it considered a good look?
In case anyone else is wondering, according to the Google search results I found, the photo in the OP is from 1923 and shows Walt Disney, Roy Disney, Ub Iwerks and other cartoonists from the Disney team, posing for a photo with the actress Margie Gay.
My guess is that the ties were that short because they were typically worn under a sweater vest (as seen on Walt Disney and several others) or a waistcoat. So it didn’t really matter that the tie didn’t reach the belt, as is customary today.
In that era it was also fairly common for men wearing a tie to tuck the end inside their shirt between two of the upper-middle buttons. It was even the officially correct uniform wear for the US Army for awhile. e.g. US army uniform men’s tie tucked into dress shirt - Google Image Search.
A tie mostly intended to be worn tucked in would likely be designed to be shorter to begin with.
Funny, but I tried to get Google image search to show me period pix of civilians w ties tucked in that way. It flooded the results with current pix of current men’s fashionistas doing that. Try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to get it to just give me/us old pix.
Or relatively casual wear, as in the photo, with sweaters and those trousers, which I think are called plus-fours. But yes, you can see short neckties a lot in movies from the 30s and 40s, usually when the waistcoats are unbuttoned. Suit trousers were often worn (even by young men) right up at the navel.
There’s a scene in the movie Murder My Sweet, where Claire Trevor suddenly shows up in Dick Powell’s room while he is still half-dressed, and during the conversation he finishes the job. He very intentionally ties his tie quite short, but it still reaches the top of his trousers.
Of course all this goes back to how long the strip of cloth is to begin with.
Given the diameter of the wearer’s neck and choice of knot, the shortest the visible tail can be is with the two tails of equal length. And the longest the visible tail can be is with the hidden tail as short as it can be without disappearing up into the knot causing the knot to fall apart.
So the as-tied finished length is rather closely coupled to both your personal torso length & neck size, and separately to the then-current fashion for men’s pants heights.
Given a bunch of this style was happening around the Depression, I could imagine a bunch of men with short ties and slowly lowering pants waistlines resulting in wearing older ties with newer pants because they couldn’t afford to update both.
No, you can have the wider end even shorter than the other one, where the longer length of the thin end is all tucked away. I’ve done that myself (for comic effect in a LARP)
A fashionista once told me that a necktie is supposed to cover the shirt buttons. In the days when men always wore vests, that required less.
In World War II army uniforms, you were supposed to tuck the tie in between the last button not covered by the jacket, and the first button covered by the jacket. When you wore the jacket, the shirt buttons would all be covered. When not wearing the jacket, the tie would have a uniform appearance not dependent on your knot-tying skills.
This is the first time I’ve heard a reason for tie length, and the first time I’ve heard a rational reason for the existence of neckties in the first place.
There was some place near the border, where males had to wear a tie, so Dad & I wore bolo ties- which were acceptable. I can not see that working anywhere but in “cowboy country” however.
