It does nothing, but men have worn it for 400 years. Behind the origin of the necktie

[00:00:00]Look at this tie. It starts at the collar and hangs to the belt, touching nothing in between. It doesn't hold the shirt closed. The buttons do that.

[00:00:07]Doesn't protect your neck. The collar does that. So why have millions of men been knotting one around their throat every morning for over 400 years? This is Chasing Beauty episode 59. And today we're looking at the tie. In the 1630s, France was fighting the 30 Years War and running low on soldiers. So they drew on foreign mercenaries from across Europe.

[00:00:27]among them Croatian horsemen. These soldiers wore something that the French hadn't seen before. Knotted cloth scarves around their neck tied in a loose knot with the ends hanging down the chest. On the Croatians, the scarves had a job. They protected soldiers from cold weather and battlefield smoke. They also identified rank. Officers wore silk and enlisted men wore cotton. In 1660, a regiment of these riders arrived in Paris. The city lost its mind and not over the soldiers, over their scarves.

[00:00:56]Louis the 14th was 21 and already more obsessed with what he wore than almost anything else. He fell in love. The story goes he started keeping a royal cravier, a person whose entire job every morning was to pick the king's neckloth.

[00:01:11]And in the court of Versailles, the king's outfit was the dress code. The scarf was quickly adopted. The French called it a crevat, derived from Croate, their word for Croatian. But an interesting thing happened in that transfer. Every functional reason the scarf existed was stripped out. The French weren't identifying rank. They weren't fighting in smoke. They took a piece of military gear and made it an ornament. By the end of the century, no gentleman in Europe would be caught without a crevat. And the less useful it became, the more status it carried.

[00:01:40]Creat, more layered. Starch muslin folded into exotic shapes. The logic was simple. If you could wear something that elaborate around your neck, you obviously didn't work with your hands.

[00:01:52]For 200 years, the neckpiece kept changing shape. Stocks, bow ties, ascots. But the function never changed.

[00:01:58]Then in the early 1920s, a tie maker in New York named Jesse Langdorf had an idea. He cut the fabric on a bias at a 45° angle to the weave and divided it into three segments stitched together on the diagonal. This let the tie hang straight, not without bunching, and spring back into shape after you pulled it loose. He quickly got a patent. That cut is still how virtually every classic tie on the planet is made today. But it wasn't to make the tie do something. It was to make it hang straight while it was doing nothing. And now it's vanishing. Presidents wear an open collar at summits. Offices that required it have dropped the rule. But the funny thing is it can't become obsolete.

[00:02:38]Nothing will ever do its job better because it never had a job. The tie will be back.