Sartorial elegance of the shirt Ð and the ties that bind

Date Published: 23-Jan-2013

It’s probably all Michael O’Leary’s fault – or Richard Branson’s or Charlie Bird’s – but the undeniable truth is that they humble tie just isn’t what it used to be.

Roll back the years to a Sunday morning in any Irish town or village and you’d be hard-pressed to find a self-respecting man without one; the notion of heading off to Mass in an open neck shirt was as unthinkable as heading off without your trousers.

And it wasn’t just formal occasions that warranted a tie either – every fella who ever bought a ticket for the Ballroom of Romance had a suit and tie on, if only to keep them standing up straight after six hours in the pub.

Even manual workers who spent all week in casual shirts or tee-shirts would dig out the good suit for these occasions – or at the very least put on a clean shirt and tie.

And they wore them with a shirt fully buttoned to the top, even if they then opted for a v-neck jumper instead of a jacket – in either eventuality there was no place for your loosely knotted versions with casual shirts.

You didn’t wear them on the golf course, but as soon as you entered the clubhouse, you’d better have one in your locker or you weren’t getting in for a drink in the ‘men only’ bar.

We had the wide kipper ties, the skinny leather ties, the paisley ones that blended perfectly into the exact same colour shirt, the white ties with the black shirts, the old school tie, the clip-on tie, the novelty tie – and the one that gathered the dropped bits of your dinner onto it like a food magnet.

Fathers get them for their birthdays, for Christmas and for Father’s Day – that’s presuming they’re sold out of aftershave and soap – and often the best use for them is as a makeshift rope for the three-legged race at the following year’s school sports.

Because there are many who believe it is square to wear a tie – or at the very least it is a symbol of suppression; a uniform for the working ‘wage slave’ to the point that triggered the phenomenon of casual days at the office or Dress Down Fridays, where you made a virtue of not wearing one.

Then Charlie Bird appeared on the television not wearing one, and the nation went into meltdown.

Now we have Mick Wallace in our Dail wearing a pink tee-shirt and Richard Boyd-Barrett wearing a crumpled shirt, and Michael O’Leary would sooner stay out of the bus lanes than be found tied down with one around his neck.

Perhaps our great backbench revolutionaries took their lead from the Iranians who saw it as a decadent symbol of European oppression. Or maybe they’re mad fans of Ikea, where the wearing of ties is actually banned – presumably on the basis that you could be trapped under a pallet of flat-pack wardrobes if it got caught up in the low-loader.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.