Cravatomancy

Big in Japan

Knitted ties are apparently le dernier cri in Japan. Quite right too. This one, by Harvie and Hudson, doesn't get enough outings

Excuse me, sir, would you mind talking to us about shirts?

Older readers may remember the Bonzo Dog Band's piece, Shirt, satirising vox pop radio journalism, in which Viv Stanshall interviewed passers-by in Willesden on the matter of shirts.

I have deliberately excluded shirts from the scope of this enquiry, yet here I must make an exception. When I was a young man one could buy boxed tie and shirt sets. They were intended to be labour-saving. Why go to the trouble of hunting for tie and shirt separately and then puzzling to combine them tastefully, when the haberdasher has done it for you? In reality the combinations of shirt and tie were at best unimaginative, and often hideous. The shirts and ties would be made in the man-made fabrics so popular in those days, attracting so much static electricity that the wearer would be a walking Van de Graaff generator. Those were the days in which we thought of a future in which cooking would be replaced by meals taken in pill form, we would commute to work by rocket and robots would clean our houses.

The reason for this preamble is to give context to the tie above. I was in Chester for a meeting and wore the shirt in the picture. For some reason I was unhappy with the tie I had brought with me and decided to buy a better one. I went into a Thomas Pink shop and, thanks to some failure of nerve, found myself asking the assistant if they had a tie that might go with the shirt I was wearing. The young man offered this pink spotted tie. He was wrong, and unimaginative. The lesson I learnt is that I should rely on my own judgements.

Two days' ties

On Monday I wore this, a linen tie by Hackett. When i bought it I was a little nervous, but now I like the wrinkled effect.

And then today, this Liberty tie. Who can tell what bird there is here? I offer a detail below. is it real or mythical? A peacock, pheasant or bird or paradise, or a roc or phoenix?

I had hoped that my black funeral tie would never appear on this blog. I'm sorry to say that it will, when I attend the funeral of Robin Lee next week, one of the kindest, best men I have ever known.

Psychedelia

This tie is rather fine. It evokes that era when I first wore a tie, my teenage years, the late 60s and early 70s; the pinks and browns swirl as if in a lava lamp.