The most annoying piece of men’s fashion has been killed off | Nathan Davies

It’s taken hundreds of years, but we can finally farewell one of the most annoying parts of the working man’s wardrobe, writes Nathan Davies.

The tie, ladies and gentlemen, is officially dead.

Tie-makers around the globe are currently Googling “how to change careers late in life” while they wait in line at their local employment service.

Websites that showed men how to tie a four-in-hand or full windsor have seen their traffic plummet to unprecedented levels.

In major department stores across Adelaide “necktie managers” are coming to terms with the fact that they now work in socks.

I used to quite like a tie, and wore one for much of the first half of my working life.

Even when I was pushing a scissor mop through the variety section of Port Lincoln Coles as a 15-year-old I was wearing a tie. A thin leather tie. Don’t laugh – it was the early nineties, but fashion-wise Lincoln was still firmly mid-eighties. There was a lag in those pre-internet days.

I wore a tie at the Port Lincoln Times as a young journalist, and at the Launceston Examiner and The Canberra Times.

It came off when during a stint working on magazines in a grubby office in Sydney’s Chinatown and never really went back on, the odd wedding and funeral aside.

I still keep a neutral-coloured tie in my top draw in case, I don’t know, the President of the United States pops in and wants to give me a good tip on a hot new band I should be writing about. It hasn’t happened yet.

But even Mr Biden himself is often photographed without a length of silk knotted around his neck these days.

Ditch the tie, man, we don’t need them anymore.

In a famous image from last year’s G7 summit, Biden, and the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Britain and Japan all posed up no neckwear. It would have been unheard of just a few years ago.

I have two reasons for celebrating the demise of the tie.

One is that my build far more closely resembles that of an out-of-shape rugby prop than a marathon runner, so any excuse not to have to half strangle myself by buttoning a collar around my fat neck is most welcomed.

Secondly, I smashed my elbow to smithereens as a kid (earning me my first-ever plane ride, courtesy the Flying Doctor), and that elbow no longer bends past ninety degrees. This means my wife has to do up the top button, or I have to attempt to do it with my left hand only. A nightmare when you’re running late.

Covid, and the accompanying work-from-home orders, may have been the nail in the coffin of an already dying trend. It was hard to knot up that length of Pierre Cardin around the neck when you’d become used to working in a flannie and Crocs (don’t send letters, Crocs are the greatest footwear in existence and no correspondence will be entered into).

A quick survey of the office this week found exactly three blokes in ties – two decidedly old-school journos who probably wear ties to the beach, and the security guard. I’m pretty sure it’s in his contract.

It’s more than half a century since South Australian premier Don Dunstan famously turned up to parliament in pink shorts, t-shirt and long socks, promising a more casual and comfortable era of formal dressing for men which – like many political promises – never really eventuated.

So I welcome the fact that we’ve finally come to terms with the fact that a crisp shirt with a jacket is an acceptably schmick look for blokes.

But if you’re still hanging on to your ties and just can’t bear the thought of ditching that coathanger in the wardrobe where the last favourite lengths of silk and polyester live, waiting for a wedding invitation that’s unlikely to come because far more friends are getting divorced than married, then good for you.

A properly knotted tie with a nice suit is still a great look. For the record, I’m a tightly knotted full-windsor man. A friend showed me how to tie it decades ago at a wedding, telling me “just because you didn’t go to a flash school doesn’t mean you have to advertise the fact”. He’s a bit uptight about that kind of thing, but he was right – it was a good knot.