The Odd Practice of Neck Binding

By LANCE MORROW

During the fuel shortage four years ago, the federal energy boss, John Sawhill, tried to persuade men to take off their neckties: it would cool them down a degree or two and save on power for air conditioners. The Sawhill movement, intelligent for reasons besides conservation, vanished faster than a Nehru suit. The men's neckwear lobby protested, and Sawhill backed down. Well, fellas, he said, just loosen your ties. But the look he proposed was wrong anyhow. When a businessman in full regalia removes only his tie (retaining the dark shoes, the suit, the shirt buttoned at the wrists), then he looks like a sharecropper--or an executive being held by terrorists. Something is missing.

Still, Sawhill was thinking in the right direction. The necktie--that vestigial bib, that morning noose--is a strange and sinister article of clothing. When a man feels ill, the first thing to do is loosen his tie; it is, after all, pressing against the carotid arteries, impeding the flow of blood to the brain. Practically, the necktie is as supererogatory as those little belts and buckles that used to adorn the backs of men's trousers. The tie has no function except to clean eyeglasses, and even that it does badly. It makes as much sense as the grenade loops on a trench coat, or perhaps even less, since the man in the trench coat can at least carry grenades if he wishes.

But it would be wrong to say that the tie is useless or pointless. Dress is language. The tie has many meanings, many symbolic and psychological uses. It is an inverted exclamation mark hanging from the throat. It subtly directs attention away from the wearer's physicality. Worn with full business suit, it can be a form of armoring, a defense and an assertion of power. It can also be a gesture of compliance. White House Aide Hamilton Jordan, tieless and amiably scruffy for years, has started dressing (almost contritely) in suit and tie in the wake of stories about his drinking and raffishness. Often, the tie is a uniform signaling solidarity among certain kinds of men, a semaphore announcing that "we all speak the language." It gives men a feeling of security, a certain formality, a necessary distance. Although the tie may be physically uncomfortable, they take psychic comfort from it.

Ties differentiate social classes, kinds of jobs. They can be flags of social ordering. The difference between blue collar and white collar has almost always meant the difference between no tie and tie on the job. While some men in, say, the professorial classes go tieless, wearing blue work shirts under their tweed jackets, plenty of factory workers aspire to jobs that involve ties. In William Inge's Picnic, Hal Carter speaks wistfully of a job "in a nice office where I can wear a tie and have a sweet little secretary." When dressing up, blue collar workers often like a loud yell of garish color, while upper middle class men tend toward more discretion.

Looping around the neck like a reiterated threat of the garrote, a necktie can serve to restrain and discipline. That, at least, is the theory behind having little boys in private schools wear them; it doesn't always work. Neckties also represent a gesture of respect. A lawyer always advises his client to appear in court wearing a coat and tie. It shows that you have the deference to make yourself uncomfortable. Several years ago, a Florida judge cited a lawyer for contempt of court when the lawyer showed up wearing a gold medallion around his neck instead of a tie.

Dress codes in clubs, restaurants and schools are a form of social discipline resting on the premise that certain kinds of dress will preclude certain kinds of behavior and, of course, certain kinds of people. Reluctantly, some of the nation's fancier restaurants have started admitting the tieless. But not La Caravelle in New York City. Says Co-Owner Fred Deere: "If you give in on ties, then people will start showing up without jackets. Next you will have shirts with short sleeves, or unbuttoned to the navel, with hairy chests and gold chains all over the place. That would be intolerable."

It is possible that neckties accomplish a certain amount of symbolic good. A suit and tie make a rather democratic outfit; the richest men wear them, and so do the poorer when dressing up, even if they do not spend $600 to cover their nakedness. Class and regional distinctions are usually evident in choices, however. Consider the outfit, prevalent in Ohio, known as the "Full Cleveland": a bright blazer (red or green), plaid trousers, white shoes, white belt and white tie.

There are symbolic, if not practical, uses for the necktie.

But can it be defended simply on the grounds of adornment, of what looks good, regardless of function? Sometimes. The neckwear industry promotes ties as discretionary plumage, the one item with which a man can express a bit of flamboyance. That argument may hold for men in properly neutral suits, but what do you say to the man in the Full Cleveland? Everything he is wearing is as loud as the roof on a Howard Johnson's.

Neckties are a little like wasp-waist corsets for women: even if one admires the look, he must wonder why they need to be uncomfortable. To be neat, the tie requires a shirt buttoned snugly at the Adam's apple. So, especially of course in summer, the body notices that it is airlessly bound at waist, wrists and neck. Food for the stomach and air for the lungs must pass down this strait constricted to appease teachers, bosses and headwaiters.

It is possible to defend dress codes while still finding it ridiculous that this oddly shaped rag, knotted at the throat, has come to define respectable dress in a man. The necktie did not arrive with any compelling mandate from nature. Its origins were whimsical enough. After the Croatians defeated the Turks in a battle during the 17th century, the victorious regiment was given a welcome in Paris; admiring Frenchmen copied the soldiers' flowing scarves--cravates. Over the centuries, the tie has gone through thousands of fitful and pointless variations: stocks, string ties and once during the 19th century, a crescent-shaped bowtie worn with a choker collar so high and stiff that the wearer could neither see to the side nor turn his head. This year, fashion designers have ordained that, along with lapels, the thing must shrink again to '50s proportions (about three inches at the widest place).

Are there alternatives? If the tie is one of a man's few opportunities to peacock a bit, then presumably a substitute must involve some color too--a brocade vest, a plumed hat. For summer at least, the newly revived turn-of-the-century collarless shirt, without the celluloid attachable collar, has possibilities. It is neat and extraordinarily comfortable. If only the collarless shirt did not reek so disagreeably of a sort of Bloomingdale's chic, which has the effect of somehow trivializing the wearer. For years Filipino men have managed to be both elegant and comfortable in the barong tagalog, the embroidered shirt that is a kind of national costume. The caftan might not pass as suitable business attire, and the clergyman's Roman collar can bite the neck. But among the tunics, togas, jerkins, buff coats, cassocks, sweatshirts, turtlenecks and other garments that humans have experimented with down the long centuries, there must be some arrangement that will get a man past the maitre d'. A necktie cannot be the final answer. A man's clothes should not throttle him. --Lance Morrow

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