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The Necktie in History and Haberdashery
| Article
# : |
10052 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
1,943 Words |
| Author
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Anne Grasso
Anne Grasso is a free-lance writer living in Boston. She has a
background in fashion and costume design. |
He showers, shaves, dons crisp shirt and well-tailored suit. Then he places a noose around his neck and tightens it.
No--he's not committing sartorial suicide. He's putting on a necktie.
Why? A seemingly useless strip of cloth tied around the neck of virtually every man in the commercial and professional arenas of the modern Western world. For what purpose? For what reason? And when, where, and how did it start?
The origins of the necktie go back in Western civilization only about 300 years. Neckwear for men, as we think of it today, didn't make much of an appearance until the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a few versions showing up around selected necks at the end of the seventeenth. Fashion has always reflected its time ... the social, political, economic, and technological currents of the day. And the 1700s brought many of the most radical changes in our world, capped by England's loss of the American colonies, and the French Revolution. Until then, Paris had led the trends in fashion for both men and women, stressing elegance, and not function, and favoring delicate silks, laces, pale pastels, and flower motifs.
But in the eighteenth century, mechanization of many functions had begun. Weaving, dyeing, spinning--previously done by hand at home--began to be commercially produced. A new prosperous middle class was born out of industrialization and foreign trade. The manufacture of clothing, plus the ideals of democracy launched by the French and American revolutions, supplanted aristocratic, ornate fashion. In its place, a new
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