fashion police
Via CBC radio As it Happens...
Tie Association, a Fashion Victim, Calls It Quits as Trends Change
After 60 Years, Trade Group Unravels;
What to Buy Now for Father's Day?
By RAY A. SMITH
What to Buy Now for Father's Day?
By RAY A. SMITH
Many American men stopped wearing neckties years ago. Now, even tie guys are giving up on them.
After 60 years, the Men's Dress Furnishings Association, the trade group that represents American tie makers, is expected to shut down Thursday.
Association members now number just 25, down from 120 during the 1980s power-tie era. U.S. tie companies have been consolidating. Others have closed because of overseas competition as the U.S. market share for American-made ties has fallen to about 40%, from 75% in 1995.
Members have lost interest. But the biggest reason for the group's demise: Men aren't wearing ties.
According to a recent Gallup Poll, the number of men who wore ties every day to work last year dropped to a record low of 6%, down from 10% in 2002. U.S. sales have plummeted to $677.7 million in the 12 months ending March 31, from their peak of $1.3 billion in 1995, according to market researcher NPD Group. Although sales are expected to get a bump around Father's Day, June 15, the future of neckties is very much in doubt.
Some members of the neckwear association sensed the trend two years ago when, at the group's annual luncheon in New York, a number of people turned up tieless. Marty Staff, chief executive of men's clothing company JA Apparel Corp., which has a big neckwear business, was one of them.
"It was deliberate," explains Mr. Staff, who says he wanted to make a statement to his colleagues. "Historically, the guy wearing the navy suit, the white shirt and the burgundy tie would be the CEO. Now he's the accountant," Mr. Staff explains.
"Power is being able to dress the way you want," he says. Although the company he heads owns the Joseph Abboud label, and he himself enjoys ties, "I just don't like when [a tie] becomes obligatory."
Mr. Staff isn't alone. A new generation of menswear manufacturers and fashion designers has grown up seeing ties as optional. While they design and produce ties, many are agnostic about wearing them.
'Ties for Other People'
Ian and Shep Murray, the founders of Vineyard Vines tie makers, don't feel any need to wear a tie to the office.
"We make ties for other people so we don't have to wear them," says co-CEO Ian Murray, 33, who on a recent afternoon in his Stamford, Conn., office was wearing shorts, flip-flops and a polo shirt.
Mr. Murray says he and his brother, who is 37, quit their white-collar jobs in advertising and public relations in New York in 1998 partly because they hated the rigidity of wearing suits and ties to the office every day. They claim that Vineyard Vines ties, featuring whimsical illustrations of whales, martini glasses and beach chairs, inject some fun into an otherwise dreary article of clothing.
"It seems like if people had the choice, they would not wear a tie," Ian Murray says. "So if you are wearing a tie, you might as well make it fun."
Likewise, fashion designer Tom Ford has mixed feelings about the tie. On a media tour for his new luxury menswear line and opulent New York store last year, Mr. Ford extolled his sumptuous $195 silk ties, made in Italy and modeled after ones worn by Prince Michael of Kent, a member of the British royal family who is known for wearing rich ties with thick knots. The designer, dressed in an elegant dark suit and dress shirt, was nevertheless standing there with no tie on.
"It was giving me a migraine," he explained about why he took his tie off earlier in the day. "You can wear a tailored suit without a tie and look sexy, too. You don't need the tie." He adds that he still wears ties when he is in London, which is more formal.
The problem for neckwear designers, as for regular guys, is that a tie no longer automatically conveys the authority and respectability it once did, even if it does cause some people to call you sir. In fact, it can be a symbol of subservience and of trying too hard.
Scott Sternberg, 33, who founded the Band of Outsiders tie label in 2004, has quickly developed a following of young hipsters who buy his skinny ties, sold at stores including Jeffrey, Barneys New York and Ron Herman.
He says younger men find wearing ties more interesting today when they are "outside of obligation." While he himself wears a tie on "whims and special occasions," Mr. Sternberg admits that he doesn't wear one to the office on a regular basis. "Ties get in the way," he says. Mr. Sternberg nevertheless sported one Monday night, when he won an award for best emerging menswear designer from the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
Stalwart defenders, meanwhile, have emerged to carry the flag. Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., the New York apparel giant that will produce 25 million ties this year, is so committed to preserving the tie's stature that it requires its employees to wear one to work every day, even on casual Fridays, when men can wear jeans.
Good for Business
Lee Terrill, president of the company's neckwear group and an executive member of the trade association, is optimistic about the tie's future and believes the current economic downturn is actually good for his company's tie business. His reasoning: Laid-off workers will need new ties for job interviews.
"Sometimes the economy forces people to look at themselves and say, 'If I show up to a job interview in a T-shirt and jeans and the other guy is in a sport coat with a tie, who are they going to hire?' " Mr. Terrill says.
Gerald Andersen, the tie association's executive director, stresses that dissolving the trade organization doesn't mean that ties are dead. Bankers, lawyers and accountants still wear them, Mr. Andersen says. Celebrities still wear them to red-carpet events. And skinny ties are a fashion trend: Justin Timberlake wears them. "Are the days when men wear ties to baseball games coming back? No." But ties, he says, will still have a place in men's wardrobes.
Male fashion cuts ties with formal look
They were the best of ties. They were the worst of ties.
Skinny little beatnik ties and mod doublewide ties. Suave and sophisticated Frank Sinatra ties and greedy Gordon Gekko power ties. Bar Mitzvah boy clip-on ties and Jerry Garcia trippin' ties. And, of course, all those closet doors decked with millions of gifted ties.
But now, comes word that the necktie may be fading into the fashion sunset.
The recent decision by the Men's Dress Furnishings Association - the trade group for America's neckwear makers - to shut down has some folks tied up in knots. A calendar crammed with casual Fridays (and Mondays and Thursdays ... ) has exacted its last, grim toll, some said.
In an age where some people show up for job interviews in flip-flops, the imminent death of the tie seems plausible. It's been a good, long time, after all, since the United States was a nation of necktie-wearers.
Look back at pictures from the Great Depression and you'll see men who put on ties before taking their place on soup lines. The stands at baseball games were once filled with men in ties - even on weekends. In the years after World War II, when employers created thousands of new office jobs, the sidewalks of downtowns across the country were thronged by men whose necks were cloaked in soldierly stripes and solids.
it's clear that the tie, once the very symbol of the male establishment, is far from the icon it used to be. Still, there's small comfort for neckwear makers: At least they're not selling fedoras.
And, given the fickleness of fashion and the fact that some occasions still demand a tie, it's probably too soon to write its epitaph.
"You almost want to say, 'poor necktie,' so abused and under-appreciated," says Candace Corlett, president of the consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail.
Predictions of the necktie's demise have been circulating for years. In the mid-1990s, designer Gianni Versace offered his vision of male fashion in a coffee-table book titled Men Without Ties, a sure sign of where things were headed. A bronzed Adonis dashed across its cover dressed in nothing but a few ties, lashed loosely around his waist.
The burgeoning popularity of casual Fridays turned khakis and open collar-shirts into suitable wear for workplaces previously better suited to suits. The dot-com boom filled thousands of instant offices with laid-back 20-somethings who saw no point in lashing something tight around their necks.
But rumours of the tie's death are roughly equivalent to the longtime predictions that the computer would soon turn society paperless. There's a lot of truth to the prognostication, but somehow it hasn't quite turned out that way.
Clearly, the tie business is nothing like the old days. In the early 1970s, when sales peaked, manufacturers sold between 200 million and 250 million ties a year in the US. Today annual sales have dropped to about 50 million, according to Lee Terrill, president of the neckwear division of Phillips-Van Heusen, the nation's largest tie maker.
A Gallup poll last year found just 6 per cent of men wearing neckties to work each day, down from 10 per cent in 2002. More than two-thirds of the men surveyed said they never wear a tie to work, up from 59 per cent five years earlier.
But the necktie still has its defenders and devotees, men who invest the kind of affection in their ties that a golf shirt will probably never know.
"A lot of people call me the Tie Guy," says Bob Smith, the outgoing provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Smith has a collection of more than 400 ties in his closet. They are vital accessories in a job requiring him to deliver many speeches and presentations - more than 700 in the past eight years. Every Smith speech is punctuated with a tie themed to the subject.
A tie with a giraffe on it for a speech about the qualities that make a good supervisor, one who is able to raise his head above the fracas to see the landscape clearly.
Another featuring a painting by Charles Rennie Mackintosh of a rose inside a teardrop that he saves for delivering eulogies.
Smith's collection, though, pales compared to the more than 1000 ties owned by Richard Arutunian, a retired Southern California neckwear manufacturer.
Today there are only about two dozen companies making ties in the US, and the business is dominated by huge firms. Many of the ties American men wear are made overseas.
There are still a few islands of tie-wearers. Lawyers and folks in finance and insurance work in offices where suits and tie remain the badges of professionalism.
- Associate Press
tie me down
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The American necktie association disbanding after 60s years.
