The necktie has had a pretty good innings. It was a key item in gents’ attire all through the 20th century, having condensed out of a more varied menu of cravats & neckwear in the 19th. It’s still going strong; but are the necktie’s days numbered?

A couple of data points:

I had lunch a few days ago with a visitor from England. He teaches at a tony boys’ boarding school. He told me there are discussions going on about whether it’s a good idea to make the boys wear ties, as of course they have since time immemorial. The fear is apparently of litigation following a suicide by necktie. (Which actually does happen.) A subversive element in my friend’s school staff room thinks the anti-tie stirring may really be an attempt to prevent the boys trying out autoerotic asphyxiation, which apparently they all know about. (! At their age, I just about had the birds and bees figured out.)My son, aged 14½, doesn’t know how to knot a tie. It’s not my fault. The couple of times he’s needed to, I’ve coached him through it; but lessons like that are soon forgotten. You need to have had to tie a tie every day, till it becomes habit. In today’s U.S.A., Derb Jr. has never needed to do that.In leading-edge workplaces like Google, nobody wears a tie. In Hollywood, I’m told, only the lawyers wear ties. Who wants to emulate lawyers? Wall Streeters still wear ties, but that may be a negative indicator too …

I shall be sorry to see the tie disappear. I still have my school ties (both regular and Old Boys) and my college tie. The latter is a replacement. I lost the original on my travels, and went to the tie shop for a replacement. This wasn’t just any tie shop, it was the tie shop, a wonderfully atmospheric old place in Southampton Row, west-central London. The proprietor was a very old man in my college days (mid-1960s); and he was still running the place, and still looked the same, 25 years later when I bought that replacement. It’s possible my imagination has embroidered the memory, but I could swear he used to wear a tail coat in the shop. He could get you any tie at all — club, regiment, school, college, guild, lodge, . . . Last time I was there, my father had just passed away. I asked the old guy if he could supply me with the tie of Dad’s old regiment, the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, already long defunct. He tottered over to an old wooden cabinet, pulled out a drawer, and produced the tie. I almost bought it as a memento, and now wish I had. It would of course have been grossly wrong of me to wear it, not having served in the KSLI myself.