With party-ready neckwear in linen, cotton and seersucker there’s no excuse this August to go without one Repost of WSJ.com
These days, “summer neckwear” might as well be a wry term for a farmer’s tan. With dress codes in decline, warm weather is rarely a cue to switch one’s tie—more often, it’s an excuse to lose it.Unsurprisingly, then, even savvy dressers don’t amass collections of casual, colorful summer ties the way they used to. “Most people would rather cycle through what they have,” suggests Omar Sayyed, president and lead designer of the online retailer Ties.com. Summertime, generally a down season for clothing shops, is a slog for neckwear sellers in particular. Mr. Sayyed estimates his growing company will do 35% less business between May and July than it did last fall.
Still, it’s an interesting moment for the summer tie. Those made from sporty fabrics are trending, even if more men now tend to leave them on after Labor Day, and slim, youthful takes on the madras tie can be found on racks everywhere from Club Monaco to Urban Outfitters.
The madras tie and its kin hail from an era before air-conditioning and casual Fridays, when the idea of seasonality in menswear was both more nuanced and more codified. “You could walk into a serious meeting in the summer and be appropriately dressed in a seersucker suit,” explains Kevin McLaughlin, founder of clothier J. McLaughlin. Skip the necktie, though, and it would have been a different story. Today, the inverse is likely just as true.
Summer suits, traditionally in cotton, linen and lightweight wool, have reduced the suffering of many a man trapped on a scorching subway platform. Summer neckwear is similarly easygoing, albeit not in quite the same way. “It’s not that you’re going to be cooler wearing a seersucker tie. It’s about the overall look and feeling,” says Robert Bryan, author of “American Fashion Menswear.”
That means brighter hues and plaids that come with an extra dash of white. J. McLaughlin’s vibrant ginghams and batik prints, for example, are playful in different ways, while diminutive dots and teeny-tiny florals at Ralph Lauren offer a subtler nod to the season.
Colors, patterns and prints aside, August is no time for seven-fold silk ties. It is arguably materials that define the summer tie. Moreover, with summer fabrics comes a certain leeway for relaxed styling. Seersucker and linen resist being molded into crisp, globular, power-player knots, so why force the issue? “Perfection is not required here,” Mr. McLaughlin notes.
A little wilting is to be expected, and has been expected since at least the early 20th century, when the colonial and European leisure class adapted their neckwear habits to warmer climates. The Prince of Wales helped popularize madras plaid between the wars, before wilder abstract prints became the rage in the ’40s. Rooster’s square-end knit ties gained a foothold in the ’50s, and neckwear slimmed down for all seasons in the early ’60s. With the spread of figurative motifs in the ’70s, so-called “conversational” ties depicting everything from martini glasses to frogs started, for better or worse, to flourish in warmer months.
In the ’80s, Armani helped resuscitate freewheeling, ’40s-inspired patterns. But the ’90s did something for neckties that preceding decades hadn’t: It made them optional. Acclimated to the open collar, today’s professional is more likely to welcome summer as an opportunity to skip the tie altogether.
Even the strictest guardians of tradition are becoming convinced. “Our policy has always been proper dress, but over the years that has changed when it’s really hot,” said Bob Kuratek, general manager of Nantucket’s Sankaty Head Golf Club. Forty years ago, Mr. Kuratek recalled, a member removed his jacket during a summer dance and “was almost banished.” It’s now generally understood that a member is within his rights to remove his tie in the clubhouse, which remains un-air-conditioned even when the inside temperature climbs to 80 degrees.
The outlier, then, is he who stays buttoned up, and this shift in sartorial norms actually works for some. “That a tie is even less required in summer makes wearing one even more refined,” argues neckwear designer Alexander Olch. In addition, warmer weather brings combinations—a necktie with shorts, for example—that were largely unavailable in the days before business mingled so freely with casual. “Now there’s a more fluid, abstract idea of formality,” Mr. Olch said. “In a way, it makes summer the most interesting time for men to be dressing.”
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