Hermes ties plus#

The story goes that punters down in Cannes, on entering the casino on La Croisette, were often turned away sniffily at the door for not meeting the required dress code.

Was it ever thus? Back in the late Forties, the Hermès tie promised access of a different kind entirely. Olympitis remembers how, in his early career, ‘An Hermès tie was a rite of passage – very much the thing for successful people in the city to wear.’ For so many, it seems, the item has become a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy – an initiation, a marker, a gold-plated security pass that comes with executive bathroom access. Up till then, I wasn’t really considered entitled to wear one at the office.’ Stefan Allesch-Taylor, the Square Mile stalwart, says: ‘I bought it the day I passed the Registered Representative of the International Stock Exchange Exam. Tom Chamberlain, the perma-elegant editor of The Rake magazine, said he bought his first one at the age of 23: ‘I had started my first job in the luxury industry and I felt this was a talisman of kinds to carry me over the threshold and into this new world – like a nicely made lanyard.’ Peter York, the outspoken doyen of men’s taste, describes how the Hermès tie ‘became the absolute kitemark for serious bankers’ in the mid-Eighties. ‘You feel that you haven’t made it in finance till you’ve bought your first Hermès tie.’ ‘It’s like a Rolex,’ a 30-year-old analyst at Schroders explains. Some of this is aesthetic – there’s an understated playfulness to most Hermès patterns, and a worldly, Gallic sophistication in the cut and feel (an Hermès tie, you suspect, could give a hilarious, touching best man’s speech in three languages in one afternoon).īut mostly it’s tribal, mythical – found in the unseen vapours of status and significance that the tie has absorbed. When I asked people what they thought of the ultimate silken, printed number, it was striking how many invoked the way it made them feel: brighter, sharper, jollier, better at their job. It is a naturally occurring source of confidence.

Hermes ties plus#

In that case, the Hermès tie – the tie ne plus ultra, the tie all other ties want to be when they grow up – is an intergalactic forcefield. A well-tied tie is a get-out-of-jail-free card, if so inclined. When you get to a certain age, a tie just holds everything together better.’Īnd then there’s that old maxim, borne out from the trading floor to the royal enclosure: the better you dress, the worse you can behave. My father has told me, on several disconcerting occasions: ‘If you’re going to break bad news, do it in a silk tie.’ Manoli Olympitis, merchant banker extraordinaire and Eighties jet-setter, said: ‘A tie can hide a multitude of sins, so to speak.

Graydon Carter, the long-time editor of Vanity Fair, once said that a decent bow tie was the ultimate hangover cure: ‘You feel better when you look natty – and people will notice your tie instead of your wan expression.’ But does the era of informality mean it’s on the way out, asks Joseph BullmoreĪ good tie is like a bulletproof vest – a silken breastplate against the slings and arrows of modern life. In its Nineties heyday more than a million were sold each year.

From Cannes to Cannon Street, the Hermès tie became a byword for status and good taste.