Up with ties!

In addition to being an all-around wonderful movie, Up contains one of the best cinematic necktie sequences ever:

What beautiful ties! (Most of them.) Carl's eventual settling for a plain black bow tie is obviously a symbol of spiritual defeat, a foreshadowing of the sadness to come. Is that a spoiler?

Wrigley's Fruit Stripe Gum

That's what Mrs. V. said when she saw this tie, and that says it all, I think. It's from the Upstarts by Fox Hill line of bygone days and is made of an unnamed silky fabric with a wonderful grain to it. It was the perfect tie for one of those glorious, bright, breezy, high-atmospheric-pressure days (if I say so myself).

Balenciaga

This vintage tie from Balenciaga looks like a jigsaw puzzle of a contour map. If you look closely enough you can see the word "Balenciaga" tastefully hidden in the red section. Not quite as tasteful as not being there at all, but at least the design is left to speak for itself.

MCM (and I don't mean 1900)

I had so much fun wearing a tie last week, I decided to do it again this week. What this narrow Pierre Cardin tie lacks in color it makes up for in discipline: its grid of eccentrically-nested hexagons in dark gray on light gray (with some blue ones thrown in for an austere kind of flair) is decidedly Mid-Century Modern. The pattern would be perfect for a brushed-aluminum screen between my dining room and sunken living room. If Dwell magazine ever does a feature on my house, I will have to wear this tie for the photo shoot. And maybe clean up a little.

Sunny California

Attending a conference in Anaheim this week (the Higher Education Users Group Alliance 09) inspired me to deploy another necktie. I thought this bright beauty by Ernex of London would be suitably Californian, so I wore it on Monday, making me the Most Overdressed guy there (vendors excluded). My plans for a second day of necktie madness were scuttled due to a stained dress shirt, but at least I got one tie blogged.

Spring?

I won't fool myself into thinking spring is here at last despite today's lovely 50+ degrees; this is upstate New York, so we will almost certainly get more snow before spring truly arrives (and probably late at that). But that doesn't mean that I can't pretend for a day and wear a vintage polyester tie of pastel honeycombs filled with "crayon vomit!"

Still here

After a long winter of turtlenecks and sweaters, and a long overdue trip to the cleaners to get my dress shirts washed and pressed, the temperature climbed into comfortable tie-wearing weather today (between 30 and 60 degrees F). Time to tackle that huge backlog of unworn neckties! Or one of them, at least. Today's tie is from Tachi Taylor, if the dodgily-applied label is to be believed, and features a woven Miro-inspired pattern.

Catching up

I've finally run out of steam. Here's the tie I wore on May 20, by Modules of Japan, one of the best of the art deco revival labels. There might be one more photo on the camera.

Products for your happy enjoyment

From a few feet away this looks like a tie with an abstract woven pattern in rather bright colors, but if you look closer you will see that the little red rectangles actually say "Toshiba," and every other diagonal band contains a repeating line drawing of a different Toshiba product. They've even labeled each one: starting at the top and working down, we have cinema T.V., battery, car radio, cordless [telephone], "fst" [flat screen television], cell phone, and VCR. Corporate ties are usually very dull, so I applaud Toshiba for commissioning one (from Vinuchi) that's so lively and distinctive, if not actually attractive.

Still pampered

It's been almost a month since I last wore a tie, and a year and a half since I wore one of my treasured Pamper Him ties from Chicago. This is the third one to appear on the blog, which leaves me with three yet to be blogged, I believe. That could take another couple years, at this rate. Pamper Him seems to have vanished, as have most of the fabrics from Exotic Silks from which they made their ties (but this one is still there). Only the ties remain, and darn few of those, I suspect.

Fortunately I have popped back onto the blog in time to learn about Catherine Gutsche's upcoming show at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte, Ontario. Faithful readers (both of you) will recognize Catherine as the artist who turned my wedding tie into a painting, which now hangs in its place of honor over our marital bed. The show runs May 14 through August 2 (2008, in case you're reading this in the future), with an opening reception on Saturday, May 24. If you're in the area, go see!

Spring has sprung

Ithaca residents were assured today that spring is finally here, because I wore my rainbow-striped shirt with a rainbow-spattered tie. (The fact that snow is forecast for the weekend in spite of my sartorial proclamation is concerning; have my neckties lost their magickal qualities through neglect?) While most of my "crayon vomit" ties are roughly 35 years old and made of polyester, this is a silk tie by "A. Taghi" of more recent vintage. The only thing I can think of to say about it is, "Whoa."

Kimono my house

It finally warmed up here in Ithaca, so I tried my hand at tie-wearing again. My tie for Monday, March 31, is a patchwork tie of vintage kimono silks by T. Carney, made in Korea. The dark band next to the bottom has a very fine batik-style resist print on it; the triangle on the right side (my left), as well as the band just under the knot, are particularly lustrous, in a nubby weave that is sheer joy to look at and touch. The whole tie is quite tactile, for that matter. I wouldn't mind wearing full garments made from silk like this.

Graphic

I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather on Monday (60 degrees, 50 higher than last week) to wear my first tie 0f 2008. A tie that looks like a graph (or several graphs) is about as graphic as you can get, wouldn't you say? This bold silk tie with rectangular jacquard weave is of unknown provenance, but is probably 30 to 40 years old and has seen a lot of use. It even appears to have been bitten at least once.

While my tie wearing, and thus tie blogging, has tapered off considerably over the last year, Mike Segers at Knot a Blog continues apace. This month will see his five hundredth blogged tie, so be sure not to miss that! In fact, I recommend you review ties number 1 through 499 in preparation for the big 5-0-0.

One last tie for 2007

Yesterday was the office holiday luncheon; readers of this blog will not be surprised by the pants in the picture at right, because they know that that's when I perform my annual Wearing of the Bright Red Levi's Cords. The accompanying tie is the last of my polyester Christian Dior Monsieurs with the CD logo in an oval near the bottom. That particular line is hard to match in terms of imaginative patterns and vibrant color combinations. Not impossible, though, so when it warms up (April? May?) I'll return with another batch of ties. Maybe. Happy holidays and best wishes for 2008! I'll leave you with a new take on a classic Christmas song from my music blog:

04 - Do You Hear What I Hear from http://burlveneer.vox.com/

Jimmy Pike

Monday's tie was another Jimmy Pike creation from Desert Designs of Australia.

Another Halloween

There is no way I could top last year's Halloween tie (there's no topping a Pucci), so I didn't try to. This year, as usual, I went with Halloween colors rather than Halloween content. This Oleg Cassini tie started out wide, I think, and at some point was surgically altered to create a more modest silhouette. The design is wonderfully 70s: clouds, colored with silver-to-burnt-orange (and back to white) gradient stripes. (I can visualize it enlarged to wall size and placed on a white background to accent a dining room or den, with shag carpet in shades of orange and brown.) And the fabric? Polyester, of course, as indestructible as clouds are ephemeral.

Special Saturday Edition

Not only is today's entry on a Saturday tie, it has two ties! I took my son Pierce to his friend's bar mitzvah today, and we both wore ties. I wore the one on the left, a black Format tie of luxurious crinkled silk with woven red and gold pattern. Pierce, making his modeling debut on the tie blog (pause for applause), wore the tie on the right, a Save the Children tie called "Schwiggles," designed by Shantai, age 8. Does he look just like me, or what?

We each were handed a program and prayer book for the ceremony. Pierce was a bit befuddled by the book, not knowing that it starts at the "back" and goes in the opposite direction of a standard English book. As he sat there struggling with it, I whispered to him "Manga style," and he got it instantly. A piece of knowledge of one foreign culture helped him grasp another one in no time; I couldn't have planned a better demonstration of the importance of knowledge and understanding.

Peek-a-boo

Here's a favorite theme of mine: a design underneath, in this case stripes in shades from white to orange to brown, covered with another pattern (plain brown here) that is then peeled away strategically to create yet another pattern. Well, not really peeled away, it's all woven of a piece, but that's the effect. The different stripes and layers have contrasting weave patterns as well, adding one more design dimension. This is a vintage German offering from Juka's Spitzenklasse line, made of "Dralon, 100% Polyacril." It will outlast us all.

Missoni Impossible

Though this tie is from Biella, I could almost swear I've seen the same pattern on a Missoni tie. I inadvertently robbed it of its color impact by wearing it with a shirt that matched the dominant color; if I had it to do over again I would wear it with an off-white, or ecru, or eggshell, or pale yellow shirt. But I don't, I've worn it once and that's that. C'est la vie.

Eros

Nope, nothing smutty: Eros is the maker of the tie, as proclaimed on the very classy label, which also tells us "London Paris New York." This is a vintage tie of 100% wool, and at four and half inches wide it's a lot of wool, and it is heavy. Leslie named their superwide tie the Bellywarmer; Eros should have named this line the Millstone. I got it in the same ebay lot as my birthday tie; that must have been one groovy guy who owned both of them. There was a third one, too, and maybe I will remember which one it was.