Father's Day ~ The Tradition

It seems that a man isn't really "dressed" unless he's wearing a necktie, although the days when a middle class man wouldn't go out or to work without a tie are well into the past. There's a whole mystique about ties, their styles and their patterns. The English put stock in which direction diagonal stripes should be. It's a class thing with them. I guess on some subconcious level we've all accepted that stripes going in the direction of the left shoulder are indicitive that the man is high class, although on this side of the Atlantic it's not easy to find a tie like that.

As for color, red is a symbol of power. Patterns consisting of little dots are called "neat", stripes are "rep stripe", from time to time paisley comes into favor. The bottom picture shows an abstract pattern Calvin Klein design from about 1980 on the left while the right hand tie belonged to my paternal grandfather and is late forties/early fifties.

I guess it's lucky that I'm a photographer. We're kind of expected to project an artsy image of ourselves, not really expected to wear ties at all for the most part, so if we wear a vintage tie of the currently wrong width, or a slightly gaudy floral pattern nobody seems much surprised.

The uppermost tie represents my love of fishing. It WAS a father's day present a few years ago, and likely as not so were some of the others. I recently culled through my collection, threw a few away because they were stained or getting a bit frayed from knotting and unknotting them. Silk doesn't hold up all that well to abrasion. I only wear silk ties. They knot better and they hang better. Silk is limp and it has a luster, not a shine.

Missing from these groupings are some of my favorite ties, the ones designed by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Yup, a rocker who like to paint abstracts and markets a line of neckties based on his paintings. He's been doing it for years and they're genuine silk to boot. The dude has class!