Yahoo Finance Necking it: why it's time to embrace the neckerchief
The excellent art-world whodunnit, Fake Or Fortune returned to our screens last Sunday, exploring the provenance of an early Freud, initially disowned by the artist, but painstakingly rehabilitated to a ‘partial attribution’ by the excellent detective work of the series’ hosts, Philip Mould, Dr Bendor Grosvenor, and the inimitable Fiona Bruce.
Painted in the Thirties, when Freud was still a student, it features a young man wearing what one of the final adjudicators on its origins (and therefore value) described as an “awful” cravat. He was referring to the technical aspects of the artist’s work, but he could easily have been referring to the wodge of blue-black cloth the painting represented.
But then in contemporary photographs identifying the likely sitter (a John Jamieson of Winchester College) it’s clear that cravats were all the rage. And judging by Mould’s attachment to his own neck scarf, we seem to be returning to a similarly louche approach to appropriate neckwear.
The tie may not be dead, but it is once again under pernicious attack – and this season it’s been from the neckerchief. It sprouted at the menswear shows in June, when the usual dragoon of dapperly dressed fashion set were pictured every inch the sauntering boulevardiers, more often than not with a scrap of multihued handkerchief sprouting from the neckline.
I encountered it once more on the Cote d’Azur in July, where a friend, otherwise resplendent in Hermès, Orlebar Brown, Fedeli and Henry Poole, had further accessorised his eveningwear choice of a Sean O’Flynn bespoke shirt worn open and the neck, with a Rubinacci neckerchief.
It’s a handsome yet surprisingly easy look to pull off: fold your kerchief along the diagonal, roll ever-so-slightly loosely from the longest side of the resulting triangle and knot firmly. Position slightly aksew so as not to compete with (or weirdly enlarge) one’s Adam’s apple, and wear with confidence.
And don’t overthink colour; a patterned kerchief works best, as it adds a degree of excitement otherwise lacking. (Follow the approach taken by my friend, who wears his with block-coloured shirts in a variety of lively hues). But whether solid or intricate, aim for a strong contrast that elevates the whole affair to statement dressing. After all, that is what it is.
As summer wind down and the correspondingly shorter evenings pick up the first chill of autumn, expect sightings of this reliably raffish look to increase, just as they would have done in those faraway days of pre-war Britain, when male informality rarely stretched beyond an unbuttoned collar and a loosening of one’s braces, but that triangle of inevitably pale flesh around the neckline would have been softened with a firmly tied cravat.
Bill Prince is the deputy editor of British GQ
