So is the tie the most unnecessary item of clothing a man can wear? It may well be these days but it wasn’t in the 17th Century during The Thirty Years War in France when King Louis X111 hired Croatian soldiers who arrived in their uniforms, part of which was the necktie, an important part of their attire as they could recognise each other on the battlefield. Louis was so impressed he made them a statutory part of the French uniform too. So, although ties remain a regulation item of clothing to this day, particularly regarding school uniforms and formal wear, they were never designed to be worn socially, only as a means of identification.
Expensive ties, very much status symbols, can cost up to a couple of hundred pounds and the cheapest can be stolen from changing rooms at golf clubs and other classy venues. This makes the tie completely classless, there’s the rich that buy them and the poor that can’t be bothered wasting their money on such objects and so they steal them.
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