The tyranny of the tie

Earlier this year, for the final weeks of The Apprentice television contest, the pretty features of contender Kate Walsh were underpinned by a tie, not a fashionably feminised one, but one that would not have looked out of place with a male ensemble of suit and shirt. Later on, during the summer’s hot spell, a City employee complained about his firm’s discriminatory policy, namely that men were bound to wear collars and ties at all times, whereas women did not have to.

In 2002, BBC newsreader Peter Sissons came in for censure when he didn’t wear a black tie to announce the death of the Queen Mum. Gordon Brown was accused of ‘bad manners’ in 1997, when as new Chancellor of the Exchequer, he failed to dress appropriately for a black tie affair at the Stock Exchange.

What is it about the neck and shoulder area of the male – equivalent to the leg zone in females – that causes so much contention and is it a coincidence that the hangman’s noose and the serfs’ collar attach themselves to the same area? In the nineteenth century, a middle-class male tied a large floppy bow about a stiff, white collar. By the twentieth century, this had morphed into the necktie that we know today. As well as adding the finishing touch to male dress, ties are often used as badges of identity. Attendees of exclusive schools hang onto their uniform ties and air them at formal reunions. Engendering this sense of belonging and subsequent networking, along with the wearing of ties, are seen as male traits. So, what was Kate Walsh trying to tell us?

In the early twentieth century, various ‘liberation’ movements gave rise to the new woman, a creature that had the right to work alongside a man, to go to school and be seen as his equal. To denote her male status, the new woman put on a tie. A century later, female school uniforms still incorporate ties – I actually wore one. By wearing a tie, the new woman was endowed with a capacity to think intellectually, and when at work to subsume her thoughts and ideas from individual pursuits into those of her corporation.

One century later, women have won the right to put their necks into the same noose that has ever been provided for men. And this brings me back to Kate Walsh. She didn’t win this year’s Apprentice. That honour went to non-tie wearing Yasmina Siadatthan. Kate is now pursuing a television career.