For some people, the bow tie is in the same category as the novelty tie, or what’s worse the gimmicky tie. But the bow tie is neither. Don’t think of this tie as a bow affixed to the top of a man’s shirt. Think of it as a short cravat tied into a bow. The Gestalt-shift isn’t semantic merely. What we call a “bow tie” is the descendant of a style of neckwear once worn by Croatian mercenaries for practical purposes: it served as a fastener, keeping closed the collars of their shirts, and was more like a short scarf than foppy ornament. The bow we know resulted from subsequent innovation (by French fashionistas) with how best to tie this short scarf. Its prominence on the collar and being in front of both the shirt and jacket recommended it for playful experimentation. Knot and bow became flourishes, and soon form superseded function.

Knot What It Used To Be

It depends on who one asks, and the data are ambiguous, but it seems that the bow tie is creeping back towards becoming a staple article in a man’s tie collection. Bow ties continue to appeal in large part to men concerned less with “the whirligig of taste” and more with self-expression, but the bow is certainly back in vogue. When actor Matt Smith took on the role of Dr. Who, British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph reported a sudden uptick in the sale of bow ties. We suspect the same thing happens each time a new James Bond film is released, and we predict that it will happen when Gary Oldman takes to the screen as Winston Churchill.

Some say that the bow tie points backward to a time when men were better-dressed. It is perhaps more accurate to see the bow tie as cut from the cloth of an era in which men were attentive to accepted norms for “appropriate clothing” and sensitive to the nuances of occasion. Bow ties were more commonplace when men wore hats as a matter of course (and promptly removed them when entering most buildings) and when gentlemen wore t-shirts as undergarments only. Gone it seems are the days when the average guy grasped intuitively the notion of situationally-appropriate apparel and role-appropriate costume. By the time office dress codes had relaxed into virtual non-existence (and bank tellers ceased dressing like people you can trust to handle your money), the very idea of a role-appropriate costume had gone out the scuppers. The tail of populism has been wagging the dog of propriety rather fiercely since the ’70s, and poor Fido is clearly benumbed.