The bowtie: A new statement of counter culture or a 'middle finger around your neck'?

In his 1833 essay on vanity and elegance, Honoré de Balzac posited a bold opinion on the tying of bow ties. The manner in which his cravate is bowed and knotted, Balzac wrote in Traité de la Vie Élégante: Physiologie de la Toilette, separates ‘a man of genius from a mediocre one’.

This was back when the fashion for men’s neckwear was in its infancy. It originated during the Thirty Years War among Croatian mercenaries, who used lengths of material, knotted around their necks, to hold together their shirt collars during battle and was then co-opted, fetishised and glamourised by the French.

Fast forward a few centuries and US political firebrand Tucker Carlson, a tireless neckwear contrapuntist and bow-tie devotee of the modern age, has another, less romantic and slightly more aggressive take. ‘A bow tie is like wearing a middle finger around your neck,’ he believes.

Today, away from the ballroom, the 19th century and the circus ring, apart from the awards ceremony, snooker table and American wedding, is there any time or place for a man trussed up in a bow tie? The once strictly applied dress codes for dinner-jacket occasions have given way to open necks: at February’s ‘blacktie’ BAFTAs ceremony in London, only 33% of (male) attendees actually wore black ties and some 40% — including Ryan Gosling, Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jnr — wore no tie at all. In this volatile sartorial maelstrom, what chance for the survival of a silk polka-dot ribbon, tourniqueted around a chap’s poultry scrag like some camp birthday-present decoration?

It doesn’t help that the contemporary bow-tie wearer is perhaps harshly judged: he is a try-hard fop, a ‘bit of a character’, perhaps appraising antiques on daytime television or teaching physics at a minor public school. He is definitely not a modernist or a hipster. The late Queen’s couturier Sir Hardy Amies felt so strongly about this controversial accessory and its exhibitionist exponents that he issued a warning against it in his book ABC of Men’s Fashion: ‘Beware the bow tie wearer…,’ Amies wrote, dismissing the offending items as attention-seeking confections ‘usually worn by individualists’.

Certainly, the bow tie, especially when donned by day, can demand a slightly fogeyish, collegiate authority or lend an air of slapstick comedy — and yet it lives on. Its carefully folded, silken wings are flying high again in rarified society, fashion shows, closed circles and southern states. With a return to dressing up (rather than down) in the air, its comeback is almost a counter-culture statement.

In London, New & Lingwood’s Jermyn Street store reported a spike in sales and Oliver Spencer of evening-wear specialist Favourbrook has seen purchases of the signature ‘Party’ bow tie (grosgrain silk on one side, velvet on the other) soaring in the post-covid years. ‘Doctors remain good, daytime bow-tie customers, a regular tie’s long tail dangling in the gravy, so to speak, not being ideal for a surgeon,’ says Mr Spencer.

The Favourbrook proprietor puts this mini bow-tie boom down to a continuing reaction to the elasticated pants and hoodie years of lockdown, selling mainly to men looking for a little zip in their formal get-up. ‘We make the sale, they go away happy, then come back in a panic — usually at closing time — begging us to tie their bow ties for them,’ he shares. ‘We tell them to relax, not look in the mirror, use the Force and think Roger Moore.’

Jeremy Hackett, founder of the eponymous gentlemen’s outfitter, a man rude with style, but contemptuous of fashions, is also a bow-tie lifer. He wears a self-tied silk one with a dinner jacket (obviously), but also a polka-dot or paisley-patterned, butterfly variant for summer cocktail parties in town. ‘Always self-tied, never pre-tied,’ he insists, echoing Balzac. ‘A bow tie is dressier and more playful, but less stuffy and business-like than a regular neck tie. If I’m going straight from work to an early-evening cocktail do, I’ll often change from a neck tie into a bow tie, so I don’t look as if I’ve come directly from the office.’

Mr Hackett cites Le Corbusier, Fred Astaire, Sir Robin Day, Bryan Ferry, Manolo Blahnik and Ian Fleming as his bow-tie heroes and, like James Bond, claims that he can tie one, sans mirror, in less than a minute, ‘even when I am a bit drunk’. ‘You stand out more in a bow tie,’ he believes. ‘Women, in particular, seem to like them. Especially southern belles.’

Indeed. Go anywhere in Charleston, US — cocktail party, town hall, restaurant, bar or store, even in 90˚F heat — and you will encounter young men gussied up, ‘southern preppy’ style, in bow ties. Worn by Charlestonian gentlemen since the 1800s, the South Carolina bow is representative of a better, classier, more well-mannered era. A local brand called Brackish, which fashions silk bows interwoven with natural, colourful feathers, is the latest go-to for Charleston’s high society: Bill Murray, Jeremy Allen White, Don Cheadle, Ted Danson, Hamish Bowles and Danny DeVito are all fans.

Can I tie one myself, making the required perfectly imperfect silk knot, showing myself, à la Balzac, to be a man of genius (not mediocrity) after a couple of Jeremy Hackett-style, pre-party Negroni sharpeners? Not a chance. I take lessons from bow-tie lifers.

‘The problem is that 99% of bow ties are knotted during periods of extreme stress, panic and duress,’ explains American expert Matt Hranek. An international stylist and tastemaker who prefers his bow ties velvet and of 1970s Hollywood proportions, he has his own signature ‘Oversized Hranek’ tie made in Paris and sold by London bow-tie specialist La Bowtique.

On one memorable, white-tie occasion in Austria, he reserved a whole hour for tie tying. ‘The less time you have, the more you panic,’ Mr Hranek explains. ‘You need to be relaxed and methodical. Don’t go looking for perfection, symmetry and pinpoint accuracy.’ A hand-tied bow, he advises, should show subtle evidence of the hand at work: ‘Which means it should be ever so slightly off.’