GEORGE McCRACKEN doesn”t have to wear a tie. A 25-year-old painter in Manhattan who works in store design and display to pay the bills, Mr. McCracken is a member of that lucky group who can wear just about anything they please to work.
But George McCracken does wear a tie. “I don”t ever wear a collared shirt without one,” he said. “It started when I had a job where I had to wear a jacket and tie, but after I left, I started wearing it anyway, out with friends, as an informal thing. It just felt comfortable.”
And Mr. McCracken is not alone. Check out any art gallery, advertising agency or downtown bar where the cool kids hang. Look at Justin Timberlake, Adam Brody, Elijah Wood or any other young actor who presumably is not also holding down a desk job.
This is a news flash that will either amuse or dismay men in their 40s and 50s, who after years of wearing a tie to work, finally won the right to hang up the old choke chain.
But this is no ordinary necktie. A far cry from the storied “power ties” in aggressively colored and printed silk twill that defined the power corridors of the 1980s, the defiantly low-key tie of today is destined for dress-up Thursday as well as casual Friday.
It may be made of wool, cashmere, silk knit or glove leather; cut a pointedly skinny two-and-a-half inches wide; woven in plaid or printed with an unorthodox pattern of skulls with bunny ears. It may boast a trendy label like Alexander Olch or Band of Outsiders. Slightly offbeat in a laid-back way — the Wes Anderson of the accessory world — the youthful tie is giving the old dress code a much-needed shot in the neck.
“It”s a uniform that doesn”t look like a uniform,” said Daniel Pipski, 31, a senior vice president at LivePlanet, the Los Angeles production company whose founders include Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. In Hollywood, where the open-collar dress shirt is king, the necktie is largely held to be a benighted relic of East Coast business style. But that has not deterred Mr. Pipski, who sees the tie as a kind of style passkey, especially the slender wool 1950s-style ties created by the Los Angeles label Band of Outsiders. (He owns about 60 of them.) To him, ties manage to be both a bit of self-expression and a concession to business dress.
“Wearing a tie is a kind of style,” he said. “It”s a thing you”re doing. It”s seen as “creative.” So you can go from meetings with the creative side and then go meet the head of a studio.”
It”s too soon to tell if the tie will come back as a mandatory presence, or if its new allure will be transitory. But while it is a smart and easy way to look both cool and professional, there is at least one rub.
Sean Safford, 34, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has rediscovered the tie”s allure and has even mastered the Windsor knot. “The problem is that all the dress shirts I got over the years to wear without ties don”t really work with them,” he said. “Buying new shirts to go with the new ties gets expensive.”
Welcome to the Fashion School of Economics, Mr. Safford.
