How to Tie a Necktie
1. It’s 1982. Your parents have dressed you up—a little too formally, you think—for a restaurant dinner. You and your brother are wearing ties, even though you’re going to a steakhouse—no lobster, no caviar, no white-gloved waitstaff, not that you know of. When you arrive, the maitre d’ greets you with a stern message: no neckties allowed. He promptly brandishes a pair of scissors, and snips off your ties, just below the knot. You look up: hundreds of half-ties stapled to the ceiling, all staring down at you like taxidermied animal kills. Your parents are laughing uproariously at this, and you gather that you’re supposed to be laughing too. The lesson you internalize here is that ties are something serious and stuffy that you should go out of your way at every turn to undermine. You open a few buttons on your dress shirt and dig into your ribeye and fries.
2. Someone has passed away: it’s a relative, someone you weren’t especially close to. At the funeral, you learn that this person had a much more fascinating life than you’d imagined. They’d marched against the war—whichever war, it doesn’t matter. They’d traveled around the world in a boat: you imagine something tiny and heroic, like Heyerdahl with the Kon-Tiki, even though it was likely an extended trip on a cruise ship in between their second and third marriages. Your relative is buried in their finest suit and tie, Windsor knot. In life, you’d never seen them in anything but a cardigan. Your own tie is strangling you: you’ve nearly hanged yourself. Also, gazing around the funeral you realize you could have easily gotten away with not wearing a tie at all. You wonder about this tradition in general. You know from bar trivia (Wednesday Nights, your team name “The Manhattan Transfers”—you’re all originally from the borough, and you love to pound Manhattans while cogitating on obscure knowledge) that either Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, or his father, George V, invented the Windsor knot. The cravat dates back to the Croatian mercenaries serving in the Thirty Year’s War (1618-1648). Their fashion was taken up by Louis XIV in France, and the craze spread across Europe like wildfire, or syphilis. Ties could as easily not exist as exist. There is a non-negligible risk of cutting off blood flow to your brain if you tighten a Windsor knot too zealously.
3. You want to throw your tie to the ground like a snake who’s attacked you. You can’t think about your dead relative even a little bit. All you can think is how constricted you feel. You hate the seventeenth century Croats, and not for any ethnic reason. You hate that bewigged bastard, the autocrat Louis XIV, for fanning the flames. You hate yourself for giving into the idea that you needed to wear a nylon noose when your distant relation themself despised all forms of fussiness and formality. This funeral is making you realize that you want to live free, unencumbered by stylish neckwear. You remove your tie as discreetly as possible. A few people stare, but you don’t mind. You sneak a few cookies from the post-service spread. It feels weird to eat at one of these things, but you’re actually starving. When you get home, you take out a pair of scissors and cut every single necktie in your closet in two.