Imagine haggling for your bonus in a bow tie: you enter your boss's office, determined to be given your due, a list of the deals you have closed ticking through your head. He looks at the jaunty, waiter-like number around your neck, strokes his striped Charvet silk neck tie, and asks you to get him a coffee.
“Bow ties are not considered the thing to wear by young banker types,” says Todd Hart, who works in the City as a partner in an investment advisory firm. “The one place you might see a bow tie in a professional environment is on an elderly, well-dressed partner; no one thinks this is out of place because it is associated with their old-school values. But if a young guy tries to wear a bow tie in the same way, he will be considered a bit of an impostor.”
But, away from the City, the number of young men wearing bow ties is growing. “We've been selling them for about a year,” says Gordon Richardson, design director of Topman (prices from ￡10). “For the young fashion guys, it's one of those items where, once they've stepped over the threshold, they're converted.” Richardson believes the skinny bow tie works best as an updating tool for the already fashionable, rather than as an item in its own right: “You can't just put it on with a suit. You've got to come to a bow tie rather than the other way round. You've got to know how to wear skinny jeans and a skinny jacket, and then put a bow tie with it.” It's a dictum that highlights the widening divide in men's wear between those who work in the City and those who don't.