A Tie Fit for a King

The King of All Cosmos, that is. It's wonderful when my passion for neckties and my passion for Katamari Damacy come together in a tie like this one. It's a vintage cotton tie that I got on eBay, where the seller described it as "ugly" and even claimed to have won an Ugly Tie Contest with it. Obviously, some people just don't appreciate retro patterns in exuberant colors (that man's workmates, and mine too for that matter), but I declare this tie fantastic! It has all the hallmarks of a homemade tie, i.e. unorthodox construction and a lack of labels. What sets it apart from most homemade ties is the masterful approach to the problem of making a tie from a large pattern, which is finding just the right section to appear on the front of the tie. The maker managed to include the entire height of one psychedelic white flower as the central motif while still allowing a bit of a navy flower at the bottom and leaving just enough room for a piece of red flower to peek through under the knot at the top, and (this is the hard part) keeping it all in place while being sewn. That couldn't have been easy.

But speaking of Katamari Damacy: he probably doesn't know it, but Italian artist Franco Costa has created pretty nice approximations of Katamari Damacy-world in some of his serigraphs.

And if you can't get enough of "Kuru Kuru Rock" from We ♥ Katamari, check out "UMA" from OOIOO's latest album.

Finally, here are some links back to previous blog entries with other inadvertently Katamari-related ties :