"The logic of the suit is balanced against the magic of the tie. The two together become symbolic..."

"... the gray or blue jacket reminds us of a common class background; the distinctive pattern of the tie orients us toward the wearer’s unique identity.... The tie could sometimes get so compressed in its significance as to lose its witty, stealthy character and become overly and unambiguously 'loaded.' There is no better story of suicide-by-semiotics than that of the rise and death of the bow tie, which, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, became so single-mindedly knotted up with neoconservatism, in the estimable hands of George Will, that to wear one was to declare oneself a youngish fogy, a reader of the National Review, and a skeptic of big government. The wider shores of bow-tie-dom—the dashing, jaunty, self-mocking P. G. Wodehouse side of them—receded, and were lost. It became impossible to wear a bow tie and vote Democratic...."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "The Knotty Death of the Necktie/The pandemic may have brought an end to a flourishing history" (The New Yorker).