Fifty Years With One Wife and No Ties

Fifty years ago this year, I was 24, and married a young lady, three years younger than me. It was also the last time I ever wore a tie.

I didn’t consciously avoid wearing ties. In fact I had several of them hanging in my closet. That was their principal occupation, just hanging there.

It wasn’t so much that I had an aversion to the idea of ties, or that I was consciously making an anti-establishment statement, because I wasn’t. Truth be told, the whole idea of having something snugly surrounding my neck exacerbated a condition I have known as tic syndrome, which is a very mild form of the better known, Tourette’s Syndrome.

Fortunately for me, I was just getting into advertising at this time, and there was no pressure to wear a tie or even a jacket. Clients, like the ones I had at Procter and Gamble, liked the idea that their creative people were slaving away in the trenches of the communication world, digging up and processing big ideas for their brands.

This was fine with me, and fine with the people I worked with. Back in the seventies, any creative person who wore a tie was either seen as an ass kisser or someone who didn’t really want to be in the creative department, but the account management department.

It wasn’t so much that it was hip to not wear a tie, it simply gave us one less option when it came to wanting to strangle account people or junior brand managers who thought they knew it all.

It was a love hate thing. And it was pretty constant because creative people moved around a lot, mostly to get raises, and they were always breaking in new account people, or ‘suits’ as they were called back then.

Myself, I was pretty easy to get along with, mainly because I delivered stuff on time and of the quality that clients liked. After a while, that gets around and nobody really gives you a hard time about anything, because they knew they could work with you, and there were a lot of creative people who couldn’t work with anyone without it being filled with drama.

The idea of a tie only came up one time. I had heard about one of the advertising managers we had who made a big thing out of creative people wearing ties. He evidently thought that the tie actually choked you to the point where your best ideas could not bubble up and onto the page.

So one day for a joke, my partner and I wore ties to a meeting with him, just to watch him freak out. We weren’t disappointed. It got pretty weird in that meeting. But we made a big show of stripping off our ties throwing them to the floor and stomping all over them. This, for some reason broke him up and we became fast friends (in that advertising way) until he got promoted out of town.

The tie has always been a symbol of the buttoned down, well organized, well groomed businessman. It was a key ingredient in the whole concept of dressing for success. And I guess in some circles it still is. Politicians all wear ties. Middle management corporate types too. No big ideas bubbling up in either of those circles.

But these days, perhaps even just recently, I have started to see that the very cream of the business world tend to dress without 
the ties. Maybe this is because they all ready have the success, and they can dress any way they want to.

When I went on my own, I started to realize that the tie was primarily an accessory of the corporate marketing world. I tended to deal, more often than not, with entrepreneurs and small business owners who either didn’t care about looking all that buttoned down, or they were in businesses where a tie was potentially dangerous if it got caught in the machinery.

Also, the entrepreneur mindset is really more about the product or service than it is about making a fashion statement. One of my clients told me one day that he consciously avoided wearing a suit and tie because the people he needed to get on his side really wanted to feel that he was down there in the trenches making his business go. Dressing to communicate that was somehow much more desirable than looking all slick.

Over the years, in my business at least, I had never been judged by the way I was dressed. In the summer I wore shorts because I rode my bike everywhere. In the winter I wore track clothes because they kept me warmer.

But the bottom line was that nobody gave a damn. They just wanted to know what I could do for them or what I had done for them, depending on where we were at in our relationship.

So I have been virtually tie-less for as long as I have been married. I wanted to take a pic of myself wearing a tie for this post but damned if I could find one. I gave them all away years ago. I hope they were all put to good use.