20 August 2015
Fading Icons: The Company Tie
by J.R.Thomas
The icons in this series may fade but their corporate colours are still loud and clear. This week we come to an icon which is fading not just metaphorically but, often, literally. Nowadays, only too frequently, these dull but resonant symbols of the loyal company man rest in a drawer or droop from a mild steel tie rack, their corporate colours growing duller each year, the gravy and red wine stains fading along with the memory of the corporate lunches that gave them birth, the moth insidiously creeping along the rear folds and into the lining.
What secrets these slender bits of silk, or only too often, we fear, rayon or polyester, were party too; the political manoeuvrings, the deals done, the breakdowns of frantic negotiations, the gentle downward drift of cigar ash, the nervous straightenings as some minor royal approached, the seductive tuggings of the knot in those clubs where jolly evenings so inevitably ended up. All for this; forgotten and spurned at the back of the wardrobe, the loyal and silent corporate servant thrust into the darkness, accompanied only by odd socks.
Many years ago your correspondent worked for a very rich man – the sort of very rich man portrayed so wonderfully in the drawings of Sue McCartney-Snape. He had no need to work for income, but business was to him a game played to be won, the mark of his success delineated by the ever growing bottom line. He dressed the part: the perfectly tailored Savile Row suits, the hand-made (Lobb) shoes, and the Hermes tie (sans gravy or Crozes Hermitage).
There was only one fly in this perfectly presented ointment – his business was capital intensive and to provide a reliable supply of the folding stuff to support the enterprise he had a majority shareholder, a major international corporation. In the early days this was not an issue – they were a long way away and we did things the way the boss wanted. But as his business grew, and more and larger amounts of their capital passed into his control, they began to think that it might be an idea for us all to know each other better. We were commanded to move onto a floor of their large head office premises on the other side of the City. No problem, they had a nice canteen, all night porterage, and much better fax machines (this was a while ago).
Not a problem, until one day, the chairman of MassiveCorp decided to descend seven floors and pay a friendly visit to his little investment. The first thing he noticed, indeed the only thing he noticed apparently, was that we wild young men were not wearing the company tie (dark green ground, with a liberal splattering of red and gold balls (wheels, the secretary who brought them to us explained after some rather unfortunate jokes). One each she brought, with reserves in case of loss, or gravy, delivering one to each desk.
We were wild and young and changing the world, or at least getting rich at its expense. We all aspired to Hermes in pink or powder blue, not red balls or wheels. Some of the new ties went in the bins and the more prudently owned were rolled up and put in the back of drawers, just in case the chairman should descend from his eyrie again.
Pah! We were not receptionists, we did not sell insurance or motorcars, or aspire to the look adopted by airline stewards. No company ties for us, no thank you!
Each morning we were, of course, all in by 7.45am, but the boss kept gentlemen’s hours, arriving between 9.30 am and 10am. Having looked over the FT headlines and early telephone messages, having run the ticker tape through his hands, it was his habit to bring the post to his eager acolytes and chat through whatever might be engaging us. His routine next morning was no different but this time an unimaginable horror rolled before him, like seaweed in a wave rolling up the beach. Gone was the Hermes, replaced by the polyester in green with wheels, clashing horribly with his blue pinstripe.
It was devastating to us, of course. All that we had admired and dreamed of, wrecked on so flaccid a rock. Only a year later did we understand, when he sold out to MassiveCorp at what the most modest estimate said was twice what his business was worth, that he had played the great game with his usual brilliance. The tie command spelled the beginning of the end for his buccaneering risk taking approach, as he had instantly realised, but wearing the wretched thing for twelve months whilst he pulled off the deal of a lifetime, made him a team player, a man who MassiveCorp could safely do business with. His tie must, for them, have been the most expensive free gift in history.
The world has moved on since then. The conference centres, concrete and pastel coloured in seaside towns, are no longer graced by conventions comprising rows of identical tie wearers being addressed, with the aid of acetate sheets on overhead projectors, by others wearing the same tie. No longer does the company rep leap out of his Mondeo with the company colours flapping over his shoulder. Nervous directors at cocktail parties can no longer peer in puzzlement at the remarkably similar ties of deadly corporate rivals . At the Annual General Meeting the directors may still be identical – male, middle aged, grey haired, clean shaven, but at least their ties are different; and they are interspersed at last with the faces of a few rising females.
Which could bring us to the ladies corporate scarf. But that, thank goodness, has hardly left a mark on history, a brief flowering which never caught on before the discipline of company style gave way to the sartorial revolution of dress down Friday. Before long the excesses that always accompany revolution led to the final ripping from thousands of necks of the ghastly dull excrescence. That frigid length of cloth over which somebody in the Personnel Department had toiled so long, spurred on by the cold clammy fear of seeking the managing directors’ approval (fourth attempt), was gone. We could all wear Hermes now, even in yellow.
In fact, what we increasingly seem to wear round the neck is nothing. Our throats are unadorned, in summer at least, and even in winter many only mitigate the risk of death with a multi-coloured silken scarf. We must not get too carried away. The Etonian tie is still worn discreetly at private gatherings; the Garrick Club tie still offends the eye in the west part of Covent Garden; and St Johns Wood burns on test match days with the MCC’s eye catcher. But these are not corporate ties, they are club ties, a different thing altogether and much harder, one suspects, to eradicate. There is a property company in Manchester which still has a corporate tie and is prepared to use it – in yellow, my God; and a city bank is fighting a rearguard action in a sort of purply-blue.
But the time of the company tie has gone; soon even the private tie may be confined to weddings and winter. We might mourn the latter; it is after all one of the few bits of colour a chap can disport, at least without flashing his ankles. But surely none of us regret the demise of the corporate version; ugly, cheap, inevitably clashing, too much about regimentation and repression. If you have one, tie it around the waist of your oldest pair of jeans and go fishing; celebrate your freedom!
