THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS Read Online Free PDF Page B

done in a four-in-hand. And unlike, say, the codpiece, which had at least an initial utilitarian purpose, the necktie has never been anything but a pointless strip of cloth, born to dangle and sway and wait for a use. Yank on one, you half expect a ticket to issue forth from the mouth of the wearer, to be validated when you buy some bit of Guatemalan handiwork  from that Crate and Barrel down the street.
    In fact, ties can be traced back, like so many pointless things, to the idle vanity of a king. And in this case, the king who knew more about idle vanity than any before or since: Louis XIV, the Sun King. Seems in 1660, Louis was reviewing a regiment of badass Croat soldiers, who wore brightly colored silk handkerchiefs around their necks. Why? Who knows? Maybe the Croats were worried they'd get separated at court and needed some conspicuous piece of clothing to locate each other later, like wayward second-graders on a field trip. Whatever the reason, Louis saw the regiment and their handkerchiefs, and just had to have one: A regiment of badasses, that is, not a handkerchief. He already had some of those .
    So he got one, because who was going to tell Louis no , and he called them the "Royal Cravattes" ("cravatte" derived from "Croat" in French) and gave them fancy handkerchiefs for their necks. That was that. The King had spoken. Everyone started wearing ties. If it happened today, the badass Croats could probably sue for copyright infringement. But this was the 17th Century. What were you gonna do.
    Men got stupid with the cravats. By the early 1800s, cravats were stuffed around the neck as if the head were being surrounded by tissue for transport in a box. Some guys couldn't move their necks at all; like whiplash victims or HR Pufnstuf, they had to rotate their whole bodies to look around. And some of these boys wore two cravats at the same time; one imagines they needed servants and a system of mirrors so they could navigate the street.
    There were a hundred different ways to tie a cravat, some of which could take hours. Perhaps for this reason, fiddling with someone's cravat was a dueling offense, though think about it: If touching someone's tie was bad, how much worse it would be if you got blood on it? Fortunately, no one who would get worked up over a mussed cravat was likely to be missed once his cravat was further mussed by a sword point sticking through it into his carotid.
    The best you can say about today's iteration of the ne cktie is that at least it's not aggressively stupid. One does not wear it wrapped around one's jaw, or more than one at a time. Even the horrifyingly wide ties in the 70s had a rational basis for their lateral expansion --they were merely keeping pace with the expanding lapels of the time. Mocking a 70s tie is purely a case of blaming the victim. They didn't want to go wide. They had no choice . 
    Be that as it may, it still doesn't take away from the fact that the tie does not now serve, nor has it ever served, any useful purpose. At least bell bottoms and Nehru jackets kept your extremities warm. Tie manufacturers would dispute this assessment of their products' usefulness, of course. But then, cigarette manufacturers used to pawn off their wares to pregnant women.  No industry can be trusted to be an objective observer of its product's place in the universe -- particularly one that has a literal chokehold on the world of men's fashion. 
    Men simply do not realize that the tie is there at all their major life events. It's there when you graduate from high school and college. It's there at your wedding. It's there at your children's baptisms and bar mitzvahs. And when you die, they stick one on you and, like a pharaoh taking a prized but aggravating cat into the next world, you are both stuffed into the ground together (and the question is: Who is the pharaoh, and who is the aggravating cat?). The only reason men aren't born with ties is the grudging acknowledgement by the tie industry