Cultural Ties

I’ve stumbled across the Cultural Ties project a few times in the course of my travels across the web. It’s an intriguing idea: seventy-five artists, many of them well-established figures of international renown, were asked to create designs for limited-edition silk neckties. Given such a wealth of talent, it is surprising, perhaps, just how mediocre many of the designs turned out to be: neither succeeding quite as accessories, nor as works of art, and falling awkwardly somewhere in between. To my eye, some of the more subtly subversive of the designs work best:

It’s been more than three years since I last wore a tie on a regular basis. In the easy-going informality of my current office, suit-and-tie wearers are the weird-looking exception rather than the norm. In most of my jobs before this one, however, some kind of neckwear was required, or, at least, preferred. Some people strongly dislike wearing ties, but, for me, that slight constriction at the neck always seemed an apt and harmonious extension of the semi-strangulated state-of-mind engendered in me by full-time employment. Several of the ties I owned were ‘cultural’ ties of a kind, I suppose, being obviously inspired by painterly styles: I had one, for example, whose fuzzy blues, greens and lilacs were clearly derived from Monet’s waterlily canvases; and another whose bright mosaic of colours owed a clear debt to Klimt. I still have half-a-dozen ties, which normally hang folornly in a closet, but which I retrieved to present here in what may well be their final public appearance…

From left to right we see here a Redaelli tie; something from the Tie Rack chain, and a Bill Blass tie that my mother-in-law picked out for me.

Again, from left to right: the tie from the now defunct UK chain ‘Principles for men’ which I wore on our wedding-day: I don’t recall whether the oily stain is a relic of that date, or if it derives from a more recent mishap; a Kenzo tie; and a marbled-silk tie from Alberto Valese Ebrû in Venice.