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Do you wear a tie? Do you have to wear a tie to do your job?
I have received several messages over the years written by young men which kick out at the idea of having to wear a tie. These young men see a tie as the badge that you have sold out to The Man. Instead of wearing the noose of conformity, the corporate uniform they instead prefer to express their individuality and the unconquered nature of their free spirit by dressing to match their chosen counter-culture.
I am not sure if anybody is really a freespirit when it comes to choice of dress. Hippies wore a uniform too. The well-washed out jeans, bell-bottoms, kaftans, beads, granddad shirts, tie-dyes, muslin tops, Afghan coats and flower motifs were just as much badges of conformity as a tie and a pair of black Oxford shoes.
Punks wore a uniform chosen from a similarly narrow, but even more silly palate of options: rips, zips, studs, strings, spikes, pins and something made out of red tartan that looks like its purpose was to act as a fake untucked-in shirt. Not only did they all dress the same they even tried to have the same personality. Angry. The rebel without a clue. They fizzed ineffectually like a loose pile of gunpowder, expelling massive amounts of energy to little or no practical end, just burning themselves up leaving a faint stink in the air and a singe mark on their parent's kitchen table. They lived a life that was full of drink, cheap drugs, cheaper sex making a very loud and incoherent sound. Their message: we've already lost. Everything's shit. We know we should care but we're trying not to. Drink to forget. The world hates us, we'll show them they're right to.
My son goes to a school that has a clip-on tie as uniform. This is an act of genius. A clip-on tie is a safety advance, my father was wearing a clip-on tie back in the seventies to cope with the prospect of criminals who might have wished to grasp him warmly by the throat. When pulled-on a clip-on tie just comes away providing a huge surprise, a very modest trophy with almost no potential for use as a weapon. A conventional tie can be used to pull the head down to a more convenient kicking or kneeing height not to mention the rather obvious potential use for hanging and garroting. But the advantages of the clip-on school tie don't end there. A clip-on tie is pre-tied, which means it removes dozens of options for making the uniform less of a statement of conformity than a statement of anti-conformity and so the student body retains much more uniformity of appearance and neatness. A conventional tie can be tied with a huge Windsor knot, a tiny knot so tight it almost has to be removed with scissors, short and wide or very long. It can even be put on backwards, seam out to the front or upside down, with the narrow end protruding and the wide section tucked into the shirt. If the idea is to be narrow a tie can have its liner removed and hemming techniques used to make the whole tie narrower. If the fashion is for a wide tie and/or a thick knot a new thicker liner can be added and possibly even the entire surface of the tie exposed to the front with a new section sewn in to form a new back. All these options and no doubt others too have been tried to turn a school uniform into the uniform of a gang. In one school I went to the trick was to remove one of two parallel stripes on the tie, at first by inking them in, later by unpicking the yellow threads completely. I never did that. Conformity is conformity regardless of who you are trying to conform to, and it's always rather sad for the conformist, the harder they are trying the sadder it is.
Wear the tie. It shows you are not a pointless rebel. Try to demonstrate your individuality, creativity and spirit above the neck.