A Flurry Of Reactions To The Bow-Tie Shot!
People’s reactions to bow ties are as individual and unique as the ties themselves.
The proprietor of a hat store in Santa Monica commended me and asked for a demo, on the same day that someone else confessed to a “suspicion” of bow tie wearers. Meeting a high school friend for coffee after being out of touch for 20 years, right after I finished work one day, I was told I looked like a lounge singer. Men my grandfather’s age strike up lively conversations about the choice, younger men cringe. Women tend to respond more affectionately to the choice but some snicker and ask me if I’m parking cars. (To which I do not hesitate to respond, “Give me your keys.”)
MSNBC talking head Tucker Carlson used to be known for wearing bow ties until he abruptly announced he was tired of them and, as he put it, “untied.” Some time before he made the change, he had been quoted in an interview about bow ties commenting on how much hostility they attract. He likened a bow tie to wearing an upraised middle finger. Indeed, many of Tucker’s detractors found the bow tie an easy target for caricature and derision.
To this, I rub my sleepy eyes in wonder. Do people really care that much?
All I want is a tie that looks nice and doesn’t fall into my soup. Besides which, the conventional necktie looks to me like a thin bib that comes to a point, and for some reason it’s pointing straight at the cock. I go into men’s lavatories and see guys peeing with their ties flipped over their shoulders and it just looks silly to me.
It started as a bit of rebellion. I went to a prep school with a dress code. Bow ties were not expressly forbidden by the dress code, yet they seemed, somehow, impertinent. That worked for me. A Providence artist by the name of Madolin Maxey had been a teacher at my school, and she was married to an Englishman who grew up wearing these ties every day. He showed me how to tie them. (They aren’t difficult to tie: that’s a myth.) A couple of times in my senior year, I sported a bow tie on campus and stirred up a teenage-sized kerfluffle.
Somehow I developed a taste for them. I don’t get comments on them every day, but among the comments I do get, more are positive than not. Guys make faces at me, but every now and then something surprising happens – like the Goth chick in an airport terminal who broke into a huge smile and straightened my tie – and I get a hilarious dose of “don’t know mind.”
August 18th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Take a bow, Zen Master…
August 18th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Aww, Sugar. Though I am cautious around bow tiers (you can thank Tucker Carlson and the guys standing on street corners hawking The Final Call for the prejudice), you’ve reminded me that I was once a fan of the tie itself. In fact, I was known to wear them in elementary school. That is, until I was expressly forbidden to wear them. It seemed my penchant for dressing “differently” from my peers was the cause of many a classroom disturbance.
August 18th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Ah yes. “Disrupting the educational environment,” that reliable old chestnut for hammering down the nails that stick out. I have dedicated part of my life to undoing some of that training. You, however, seem to have retained some of your immunity to Social Automaton Disorder, Tara. I am so pleased.
August 18th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
bow tie, I remember an artist who only wears bow ties in his nice suit and he was old and funny but nice, I hear he was an accomplished painter.
August 20th, 2006 at 6:25 am
i like bow ties. they give me the assuring impression that i’m with a scholarly gentleman.
August 21st, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Somehow gentlemanly, with a bit of the male-version of Pollyanna.
Will you stop wearing them when they come full force back into fashion (everything old is new again!)?
quid
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Lynne, are you kidding? At that point, I’ll be introducing my own line of festively colored and smokin’ hot bow ties.