Male Pattern Badness
In place of the "power ties" of the Reagan years, Washington men are now wearing neckties that look like walls of Play-Doh oozing through a chain-link fence. Ties that look like amoebas marching across the Hawaiian flag, like a pool table dressed up as a rain forest, like a squadron of Chiclets lost in space, like the colorblindness test that kept your Uncle Lou out of the Army.</br></br>You see them all over downtown Washington, laid out in the paneled eternity of Britches at $50-or-so apiece. Or hung out by street vendors in three-for-$10 clusters so thick you could use them as automatic carwash brushes. Even at Brothers, where next to the tiny pheasants there's an apocalyptic paisley.</br></br>Just a few years ago, these neckties were not only out of fashion, not only bad taste, they were reactionary relics of the 1940s, like Filipinos standing in dime-store windows demonstrating yo-yos. And power ties were the fixed and final style for the Connecticut Avenue Commandos, the Gucci Gang, the K Street Torpedoes.</br></br>"Power ties started in Washington," says Gerald Anderson, head of the Neckwear Association of America. They were little prints (called "neats"), often on a yellow background, the sort of thing you might reupholster a chair with if the Queen of England were coming to visit. Or polka dots, transcendently genteel in their tininess, as if someone had fired holes in the tie with a shotgun loaded with dust. There was something irreducible about them, the distillation of male respectability to a Zenlike potency.</br></br>It started with the trend-surfers, the retro freaks, the thrift- shop mavens. They were the first to spot the styles of the '40s and '50s as a growth stock. Soon you saw these ties on hip waiters and art gallery assistants, on men who spent a lot of time in New York or Los Angeles, which were places that had never treated the power tie as some kind of bias-cut Shroud of Turin.