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7月29日 Generation Gap - 4 These pairs of neckties do not have such a close bond across the generations as other ties in this series have. Basically, these are four variations on the vertical. As un-vertical as I am, these are ties that I need.
The one on the left is the newer tie (Florence Silk Co. Ltd.). The older tie is one of the very few vintage silk ties that I have. One label reads “Dominique France - New York | Paris | Monte Carlo – Pure Soie,” while the other reads “Made Expressly for Lewis & Thos Saltz | Washington.” On the point, it has a very faint imprint of “Dominique France” in script. It is fairly narrow, but it does not appear to have been cut down, as some of the older neckties I’ve worn recently have been. The older necktie has a repeated pattern of stylized feathers or plants, which break up into short vertical units which to me suggest the short vertical units (irregular stripes) of the newer one.
On the left, the older tie has no labels, but it does have imprinted on the back, “From Haband,” and there is what looks like a signature. The newer tie has a label, “J. Ferrar | Made in Italy” and another label repeating the country of origin and “100% Silk” There is a complicated brocade. These two neckties share asymmetrical vertical designs, a theme I explored for a week a while back. And so, we are up to 389 ties. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月22日 Generation Gap - 3While the spiral captures the energy and fun of the vintage ties, there are other typical motifs. One common image on older neckties (and on their descendants) is of quadrangles apparently sprinkled at random onto the tie. Consider these.
The one on the left is the newer tie (John Henry, silk, US). On the right is an elderly orphan (that is, a tie with no labels). Just above the image shown for the old tie, the pattrn ends, an he rest of the tie is solid navy blue (with brocaded quadrangles). That's typical of the older ties, so that the knot would be solid.
I'm being tricky this time out, because in both pairs, the newer tie is on the left. Here the quads are smaller, but there are more of them. The tie for the 27th has a label "Fierté s.r.l. | Made in Italy for Today's Man." Another label identifies the material as silk, and on the lining, "Fierté s.r.l." is brocaded repeatedly. The old necktie has one label, "Adam | America's Famous Hatter." This tie may give me some trouble, because it has been brutally narrowed - at some points, by more than a half, so that it ends up narrower than the new tie. And, this brings me, by my revised and corrected count to 385 ties.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月20日 Meryl Streep, Understudy? One of the great legends of the theater is that a star is indisposed, an understudy fills in, and a new star is born. The reverse happened recently around here. A rather pitiful little tie was scheduled for the 17th. When I scanned it, it looked dirty (although nothing "dirty" showed up to the naked eye). It was one of my guinea pigs for my experiment with cleaning, which worked well with three of my old ties, although when scanned, the tie still looked dirty.
On the morning of the 17th, when I tied it on, it just did not work. At some point, someone had apparently done some surgery on it to make it narrower. When I tied it, the part hanging down in back, for about a couple of inches below the knot, was wider than the front. It was not a pretty picture.
After wearing it for a few moments, I grabbed another tie for the rest of the day. It was one of two ties from the Christopher Reeve Collection that I've found recently. (There goes the planned two day sequence.) This silk tie, made in the US by Stonehenge features a design by Meryl Streep. So, the star graciously stood in for the unknown. (And the date is red, to show the correction.)
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月18日 Generation Gap - 2 Although there are other motifs that cross the divide of vintage neckties and recent ones, the spiral is such a strong and varied theme that I am going to share four more examples of it. Again, in each pair of ties, one is old, one is new, but, to me, they share a bond.
The blue tie for the 19th is a newer tie (Don Jonathan, silk, China), and it was a gift from a fellow thrift-shop junkie. When he presented it to me, at first I thought it might be a Rush Limbaugh tie. Its spirals and stripes make me think of the older tie for the 20th (Barrister Cravet, rayon, US), which has spirals and lines, although the lines aren’t as orderly as those on the newer tie.
The next week begins with two ties with strong spirals running down the center of the tie, almost like a diagram of DNA. On the 23rd, I’m wearing an old tie (A Better Cravat, Five Fold, Resilient Construction), and on the 24th, a newer tie (Evan-Picone, silk, USA), which has an unusual rough texture. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月16日 More Transitions This summer, I've referred often to our Transition program, for visually impaired high school students, but I want to look back at some other transitions. Beverly Sills is dead. Although my enjoyment of music has almost always been a solitary vice, I actually saw (and more importantly, heard) Sills twice, each time in the company of friends, once at the Met in New York City, once at the Fox (the only time I ever went there) in Atlanta.
The Sopranos (considering the previous paragraph, no pun intended) ended, abruptly, and I loved the ending. I read years ago that classical literature had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but that modern literature dropped the beginning and the end. How true for Tony and Co., and how appropriate.
Things have been in a turmoil on the tie-blogging front. Burl Veneer came back from a two-month break to announce, perhaps, an end but definitely a beginning... to a new blog, with nary a necktie in sight. Will Stuivenga was away for a month but is now back and going strong. Newcomer Coat and Tie continues his "conglomerations."
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月7日 Generation Gap - 1Last weekend, I was down in the vaults, looking over the ties, wondering in which direction my necktie-wearing would take me after a hot lot of wildly thematic ties worn so far this summer. I turned into a catacomb that I had not visited in some time, and there I found some lovely ties languishing, as bored but certainly not as boring as Prince Charles (recently referred to in the Turnbull & Asser entry), waiting for his mum to die. They are perfectly respectable ties that somehow have not managed to fit into any of the various schemes and themes that shape this blog. Since a number of these neckties carry on the exuberant energy of my grand old vintage ties from the 1940’s and 1950’s, I decided to pair each of these modern ties with one of the vintage ties. Sometimes, the connection is obvious, sometimes, perhaps not. Anyway, in each picture of two ties, one is a golden oldie, the other a rank newbie. It might be fun for you to look at them and try to decide which is which.
In the first picture, above, the tie for the 11th is the old-timer, with a label reading “Bond | Style Manor.” The tie for the 12th is by Henry Grethel (silk, US).
On the 13th (happy birthday to my friend, the Colonel), I’m wearing a “Studio 1409 | New York” tie (silk, US), and on the following day, an old tie with a label reading “Yankee * * Cravat | Super-Made,” with a message printed onto the fabric, “Palette Prints.” Besides a rich brocade, the new tie has a very distinctive feature: the gold net overlaid onto the design and the row of gold dots are raised above the rest of the design.
The necktie for the 17th is admittedly old, but it is not as dirty as it seems to be in the scan. In fact, this is my third attempt at a scan, and none of them were satisfactory. I did not notice this when I was selecting these ties, but it has the “Bond | Style Manor” that the tie on the 11th has. There is a difference; the first tie has the number 21 on the label, while this has the number 10. Finally, this assortment of big, bold swirls ends on the 18th with a Claude Montana offering (Claude Montana Paris, Italy, silk) that is certainly worth the wait. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but I decided to use the days off to get ahead with the blog and, of course, to take advantage of the supposedly lucky 07/07/07 date. I wish we could keep records of all the weddings performed today, and check in with them a year from now.... Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月5日 True ConfessionI recently announced that in eighteen months, I had blogged 378 neckties. That was not correct. Back in December 2005, I began this blog with some preliminaries, including a listing of twelve “fundamental ties” (here and here). It is interesting to me, as I look back on these twelve ties, to think how differently I would select “fundamental” ties today. (The appearance of these early pages suffered when this blog-space was reworked.) Those ties were presented and discussed, they had been worn previously, but they were not taken out of the rotation. Back then, there was a rotation of ties, from one drawer to another as they were worn. Now, I have a whole chest of drawers full of ties yet to be worn as well as plastic bins of ties already worn. Some of the twelve have been worn and blogged later, such as one of the recently worn Turnbull & Asser ties. Some are waiting to be worn and properly blogged. That means that those twelve ties actually were being counted twice. The correct count should have been 366 neckties. What can I say? Hang it, Chad, back in the year 2000, the world learned to its unending sorrow that we people in Florida have trouble counting. Of course, back then, it was not a matter of counting something as important as neckties. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved A Fourth, a Birthday Yesterday (Wednesday) was the Fourth of July, which I had off, and so, to give myself an early birthday present, I'm taking off today (Thursday) and tomorow (Friday). It was my favorite kind of holiday, at least once in a while; I did not see another person all day, and I had only two brief telephone calls near the end of the day. My day was spent with some of my favorite things. I had quite a lot of fun with neckties (not worn) and the resident animals, but there were also California jug wine, lentils, and the now traditional Twilight Zone marathon on Sci-Fi.
Those great old shows work so well on so many levels that one of the weirdest things about these weird stories is their sometimes eerie resonance. (Quote from one episode shown yesterday: "A pardon! That's the only gift I want.") I could spend several entries on them, but I'll, for now, limit my remarks to the subject of this blog, neckties.
I noticed, once again, on these shows that the short neckties of yore were generally worn with a jacket (buttoned) or with a vest (buttoned) under a jacket. It is very rare to see a gent wearing a necktie without a jacket or even with the jacket unbuttoned, so the short ties (shorties?) aren't so obvious. In two episodes revolving around gentle schlemiels ("I Dream of Genie" with Howard Morris, and "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" with TZ favorite Burgess Meredith), both of them were bowtie wearers.
Tuesday is one of those days, my birthday, and at this time in my life, it seems appropriate to wear a necktie with dinosaurs on it. For about five years, dinosaurs paid my rent, since I was working at a nearby dinosaur theme park. In some ways it was a dream job, since I was absolutely bonkers for dinosaurs when I was growing up. Big boys have big toys, and I had the biggest toy dinos around. I didn't, however, get the Fourth of July off... or health insurance either, and big boys eventually have to outgrow their toys.
I did accumulate several dinosaur themed neckties during my tenure as "Dino-Mike." In fact, that was the first time that I associated neckties with work, although I rarely wore a tie at work. It is strange that these are the first dino-ties I have blogged.
Monday, I'm wearing carnivores, specifically, "Albertosaurus Libratus| Late Cretaceous Period," although, ironically, Albertosaurus was not represented at the park. The manufacturer is not identified. There is a store label, Mur-Lee's, in Lynsbrook, NY, but no manufacturer's label, and the tie is made of polyester, although most of my dino-ties are silk. On my birthday (Tuesday), I'm going, appropriately, with a slow, easy-going herbivore with an identity crisis, Apatosaurus (a.k.a. Brontosaurus), shown on a silk necktie (Wild Kingdom, "Jurassic Country, © 1998 Marc Dennis," US, silk). I just found a website for an artist named Marc Dennis. In the Sketchbook section, there are some dino-drawings, but the Paintings are mainly florals, with some fascinating insects thrown in. I'm guessing he did the Apatosaurus paintings on the tie, but I'm not sure. How many artists named Marc Dennis with a fondness for natural themes could there be out there? But, his lovely works are certainly worth a look. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved 7月1日 Turbull & Asser - Sorbet for the Neck In all honesty (first of two confessions), the ties have been a little wild around here lately, for the celebration of the recently ended Transition, and I was looking for a way to calm things down a bit. Coincidentally, Coat and Tie recently referred (here) to Turnbull & Asser ties, downright quotably, "Besides, if anyone asked about it, it would be cool to say, 'Yeah, it's a real Asser!' Or, 'This one's so bright it'll turn a bull!'"
So, T & A (remember, this is a family-friendly blog) it is. I have two of these gorgeous ties, each with a label reading, "By Appointment to HRH the Prince of Wales - Shirtmakers" and "Hand Made 100% soie 100% silk, Turnbull & Asser | London | Made in England." Great silk and lovely colors, which actually seem to change in sunlight.
And that's about all I need to say about that, except that there is a British connection this week to the music that I've been listening to, the joyous songs of Flanders and Swann, another British twosome. About the title: I feel that these neckties will do for my neck what a sorbet does for the palate - provide a cleansing pause. Oh, about that other confession.... Copyright © 2007 by Michael Segers, all rights reserved |
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