A month into the COVID pandemic, I drove to my favorite local menswear store in Nashville, Haymakers & Co., and went live on Instagram to showcase the latest products for the spring/summer collection. They were holding a sale-on-everything to try and move product, and I wanted to help them spread the word. Even if they were restricted from doing business as usual, they were still able to ship anywhere in the country. And while they had canceled much of that spring’s orders with their vendors, much had already come in. As a thank-you for my effort, they offered me a free tie. I chose one from Drake’s designed with a stripe of navy, turquoise and gold. It remains my favorite tie to this day, not least in part due to those memories of that shop, that time, that city, and those people.

In the seasons and years that followed, that arrangement of ties in the Haymakers showroom from which I chose remained unchanged. People stopped buying them, and the shop stopped ordering them. The public’s mainstream purchase of ties had slowed considerably already; then the pandemic only slammed on the brakes. One of my all-time most-commented-on posts is called Will Anyone Wear Ties Anymore?, published just 3 months after that IG Live post.

It’s been nearly 5 years, and while the world in many ways is back to business as usual (at a much higher cost), ties have had it much rougher. Virtually nobody wears them save for waiters, ministers, and lawyers on court days.

My entire menswear journey has been about how I love tailored, classic menswear, but wearing full-blown coat-and-tie feels too dressed up for my environment. And so I’ve learned how to dress down tailored clothing in a way that’s of course still elevated above a t-shirt and jeans, but not so much that it looks like I’ve just wandered out of a court date.

Yet the necktie may yet see a big resurgence. Menswear influencers, content creators and advisors still regularly wear ties, showing how classic menswear as a form of dress is unmistakably best when fully embraced. As a shorthand for respectful, public-facing decorum in dress, “coat-and-tie” remains unbeatable. Younger generations are surprising people in just about every sector, whether that be an uptick in conservative politics, a plateauing of declining religion or a rejection of Millennials’ beloved skinny fit everything. Perhaps the necktie will see a boost from younger people embracing modes of dress nostalgic of previous eras when a family of 5 could live on one man’s salary in a home of their own.

So at the end of January, I decided on a whim to wear a tie every single working day during the month of February. To the office. For reference, my 9-5 job is business casual. The creatives I work alongside wear jeans any given day; the IT guys are in khakis; the upper-level office-holders, including the president, wear what I can only assume they would call “slacks.” Polos or button-ups are the norm; and only a couple guys besides me ever wear a blazer or sportcoat.

Here’s what I learned from wearing a tie 5 days a week in a casual office environment, and lessons for you, dear reader, to take away for your own life.

It was not any less comfortable than not wearing a tie

Open-collar shirts are undoubtedly less restrictive if you need to bend down to pick something up or crawl under your desk for some reason. But for the vast majority of time, buttoning up that collar and tying a tie makes no functional difference. Only one shirt I wore the entire month, on which the collar was slightly too small, did I become so uncomfortable that I was desperate to take the tie off at the end of the day.

If you find wearing ties uncomfortable, consider that your shirt collars aren’t the right size. If you’re sick of shirts not fitting right, my favorite online shirt company is Proper Cloth. Use my code MUSINGS10 to get a discount on your first order.

Getting dressed in the morning was easier

A coat-and-tie outfit is automatically dressier. As soon as you learn the basics of classic menswear—pattern matching, formality levels, color matching—it turns out that dressing up is way easier than trying to creatively dress down. In particular, it changed which trousers I was reaching for; I relied much more heavily on tailored trousers like high-twist, covert twill, flannel or tailored cotton trousers instead of the jeans, chinos or fatigues I typically wear. Only on the days I was trying to color outside the lines a little bit by wearing a tie casually with just knitwear or another form of outer layer did I have to put more thought into an outfit.

If looking great without too much thought, dressing up and finding your uniform in classic tailoring is infinitely easier than being a creative dresser. My favorite shops for great clothes can be found here.

I ended up experimenting with various layers a lot more as a result

Adding the tie as an accessory increased my desire to play with other layers. I think this has to do with the overall mental barrier to standing out a little too much. I just read a great article discussing the social capital it requires to dress in out-there ways, and felt it was spot-on. With Tie February, since I was already going above and beyond with a tie (out-dressing every single one of my superiors), I’d already broken through that self-imposed restriction. That then gave me a sense of freedom to be extra creative if I wanted to. Examples of me thinking outside my normal box were this fit, this fit, this fit and this fit. Perhaps the sobriety of coat-and-tie has something to do with it as well—that gives a little extra latitude to doing something a little stranger.

Reflect on what holds you back from dressing up the way you really want to. Those barriers may only be self-imposed, not a reflection of anybody else’s honest opinions. In my eBook, I discuss this at more length, in addition to other much more basic rules about pattern matching, layering, and more. Buy it here.

It turns out I have a strong preference for casual shirt fabrics for most of my shirts

As I surveyed my much-too-large shirt wardrobe each morning, all the shirts I wanted to wear with a tie were spread collar in smooth broadcloth or end-on-end fabrics. But that is not the majority of my shirts. Instead, most are made in more textured fabrics like Oxford cloth shirts from Brooks Brothers or from Drake’s, or linen-cotton blends, chambrays and denims from Proper Cloth. I found that I was wanting to wear just a handful of shirts, then wash them and wear them again. The shirts I love most with a tie are smooth—broadcloth or end-on-end—which are not only comfortable against the skin, but provide a great backdrop for the interesting textures the other elements of an outfit bring to the table [more on that in this post]. That said, the downside of these are they require ironing (because I am against non-iron fabrics, just as a personal matter of comfort; although, even non-iron shirts should still get a pressing with an iron in particular on the collar and cuffs before wear). And I think that’s a big part of the dichotomy for me—oxfords, chambrays and denims can be worn straight off the hanger. But once I built in a quick ironing into my daily mental routine, that issue evaporated.

If you are building out a wardrobe of both casual and dressier clothes, I suggest Oxford cloth and end-on-end as the two staple fabrics. Both can be worn open-collar/dressed-down, or with a tie/dressed-up (depending on color and pattern. A plain white end-on-end/broadcloth will be tougher to wear dressed down). I get into more of this kind of thing in my eBook.

Lastly: It wasn’t that big of a deal

Hardly anybody said anything about it at work. In advance, I had told a handful of my colleagues that I was going to be wearing a tie everyday during February. But the majority of my coworkers in the office did not know. And nobody made a big deal about it (and I wonder if any of them even noticed the tie was an addition to my typical sportcoat-and-jeans-type outfit). True, they already know me as dressing up in day-to-day; but most of my coworkers are not aware specifically of this website or my Instagram, so it isn’t like they shrugged me off as an influencer doing influencer things. Back to the idea of the social capital of dressing outside the norm in your typical circumstances, it probably is simply a matter of building up to a point where people just accept that as how you are. I’ve worked in the organization I’m at for 14 years. People expect to see me wearing dressier clothes, same as how I expect certain coworkers to wear sweats and sweatshirts.

Level up your clothing choices because you want to and because it feels good. Let the chips fall where they may. While there is a social language to dressing well, and learning what works for your own style and circumstances is definitely a thing, don’t let your perception of the opinions of others stop you from looking great.

Concluding thoughts

A couple days before the end of Tie February, Charles Yap, owner of The Decorum, a shop in Singapore and Bangkok, said in a DM: “Let’s do #tie2025 pls”. Based on how it’s gone these past 4 weeks, I replied “Wearing a tie looks so good I will likely wear one far more likely from here on out.”

“And feels so good too!!!” he responded.

Here’s to more ties, more often, in 2025 and beyond.

Where to buy great ties (and if you need a tie rack, Dapper Woodworks is the choice. MM10 gets you 10% off).

Drake’s

The Armoury

J.Press

H.N. White London

Shibumi Firenze

Spacca Neapolis

Sam Hober

Seaward & Stearn

Amide Hadelin

E.G. Cappelli

Here’s all my #TieFebruary fits with shoppable outfit links

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Shop my clothing from this post and every other post on the Shop My Closet page. If you’re just getting into tailored menswear and want a single helpful guide to building a trend-proof wardrobe, buy my eBook. It doesn’t cost that much and covers wardrobe essentials for any guy who wants to look cool, feel cool and make a good impression. Formatted for your phone or computer/iPad so it’s not annoying to read, and it’s full of pretty pictures, not just boring prose. Buy it here.