because y'all like my wardrobe stuff

[rm]

So this morning I finally figured out how to tie a half-windsor. Yes, I was using a shitty knot (four-in-hand) before this. I feel so stupid it took this long for me to get it, although I do lay some of this on being left-handed and so no drawing of this sort of thing can make sense to me ever, but I almost don't care how stupid I feel about having not gotten it, because I am so hideously pleased with myself now.

Of course, this was a random, half-asleep grokking of it, so I'm not actually sure I'm going to be able to repeat the feat, but I think so. Anyway, this knot? fucking superior.

Comments

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I can only do the Four-in-Hand (or as I call it the over-over-under-through), so I'm very impressed as well!

A Half-Windsor is hard. I tried to tie a tie with a HW for a Butch-Femme event and it was utter failure. Had to be the Four-in-Hand despite the fact that it should have been a HW.

[marcmagus]

Congratulations. Even if you don't proceed directly to being able to repeat it every time, I suspect that having gotten it once will help you figure it out the next time.

I think the half-windsor will suit you and be a good addition to your vocabulary. I'm glad to hear it's clicking for you.

[Gah, that reminds me of all kind of knot-tying stuff I've been meaning to research (both modern and historical for my own knowledge) and write about (historical). Thank you for the inspiration.]

[gallo-de-pelea.livejournal.com]

I had to wear a tie in Half-Windsor at my last server job. There were several hours of practice involved at the beginning.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! as a lefty who was always a little left-right dyslexic, I salute your efforts. There's a reason I either make someone else tie mine or tie it in an obviously intentional mess.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Well done!

I'd ask you to show me, but seeing as I'm right-handed, it would probably go poorly.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not actually sure if I am doing it backwards or not, but on that score I don't actually care.

[cruentum.livejournal.com]

I just pulled apart the knot on one of my ties to get an idea of how long the tie is (61in is just ... too long even for me), so I'll have to look at the internets again just to get a knot back into that, but am okay with the half-windsor, usually go for four-in-hand though just because the knot is smaller and goes better with skinny ties as well as having the nicely untidy feel to it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I feel like everyone in the states does a four-in-hand, to the point where you can tell the finance guys over from London because they don't.

[cruentum.livejournal.com]

Really? Because I think I picked up the half-windsor first because it looked so nicely complicated, but okay, that's an interesting preference. That said, I dress casual with tie, not business, so I do prefer the slightly more casual over the proper LOL

[marcmagus]

I agree with this: my experience growing up male in the Northeastern US was that "learning how to tie a tie" meant [for me and everybody I knew] learning a Four-in-Hand. Anything else was exotic, which either meant kinda cool or a bit weird depending on who you were interacting with.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm glad I'm not just randomly maligning men for dressing badly again (NYC is a particular offender, no one wears a suit that fucking fits).

[marcmagus]

I think most people have no idea how a suit is supposed to fit, let alone how to go about obtaining one. Since they're mostly taking their cues from each other at this point, and they're coming from a distinctly American style of preferring to look a bit daringly casual [that whole cowboy thing], they all end up looking like they're wearing Daddy's old clothes that are a tiny bit too big and were never altered to fit, with a tie they kind of threw on because they don't really know how to tie it. Except the jackets, which look like they were bought just prior to their last growth spurt, in which they gained a couple inches in the arm and either lost or gained about four inches in the waist [so they're either swimming in the thing or their belly is straining at the buttons, but the arms are too short regardless].

I'm pretty sure much of my own wardrobe fails on at least some of these tests. Finding stuff that fits is harder than is credited, and, since nothing fits OTR, expensive. I think most of us were never taught how to shop for things that fit right.

I've accepted in the last year that the 4IH has its place [see cruentum's comment, for example], and it is the current style, but I think the whole thing is often done extremely poorly, to the effect that it looks like men can't dress themselves, as you mention.

[ckd]

In my case, I have a suit that fits, or at least should still fit since I just bought it last year. I have never worn it.

I bought it for a round of job interviews, because in my field (systems administration/IT) nobody wears a suit, or even a tie, if they can help it. However, both of the places I wound up interviewing told me not to wear a tie to the interview (in one case, adding "or you will be mocked") and so I didn't.

The best part? One round of interviews was on April 1, and a bunch of the people I talked to that day were wearing suits as part of a gag...and each of them was quick to reassure me that they didn't really wear a suit and tie normally.

I love this field. A shirt with a collar and pants that aren't denim? That's dressing up (aka my normal workday routine, since I try to stay a notch above the general run of sartorial "splendor" in this crowd).

As an aside, it's been so long since I wore a tie I don't even know which knot I use (though it's probably a four-in-hand); I'd actually have to put one on and tie it to be sure. I do always make sure the knot looks good, so I hope to avoid "the whole thing is often done extremely poorly" as you describe it.

[marcmagus]

I'm in software dev; I know whereof you speak, and also love it. My workday wardrobe is pretty much identical to yours: trousers year round, polos and short-sleeved button-downs in the summer, full sleeves the rest of the year.

My wardrobe is consequently skewed to the extremes, with a batch of jeans/t-shirts for casual stuff/convention-going, a batch of trousers/shirts for business/casual dance, and then a jump to a 3-piece suit, a tuxedo, and a tailcoat for stuff that requires those levels of formality. [And if you'd asked me 6 years ago, I never would have believed I'd need either a tuxedo or tails, let alone both.]

That whole cowboy thing

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Ahem. In this part of the world at least, the real cowboys would have been much better dressed for a formal occasion(like a real live theatre or a fancy-do.)

"Learn how to do this right, son. You might have to meet the Queen someday." My Southern daddy used to say this.'Mom told you to say that.' 'She did not. It was your great-grandmother.'

How the West was won. Up here.

Re: That whole cowboy thing

[marcmagus]

I apologize. I'm sure I could have come up with a better way of evoking the idea I wanted to, or at the very least least made it clear I was referring to how culture has endorsed and reacted to its own stereotype of itself rather than any real people.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that cowboys are either sloppy dressers or inappropriately casual, and I'm sorry I ended up doing so.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

Oh good God, yes.

It makes me sad.

[mneme]

I can confirm this from my data point -- it's certainly the knot I was taught by my father, growing up. The half-windsor doesn't seem hard, and has a nicer symetry to it, though; I'll try it, next time I need to wear a non-bow tie.

[valkyrwench.livejournal.com]

My grandfather taught me to tie a Windsor knot when I was 10. I've been tying half-windsor by default ever since.

Congratulations on learning it. I never would have picked it up if not for being shown over and over and over again.

[wynkat1313.livejournal.com]

"this was a random, half-asleep grokking of it, so I'm not actually sure I'm going to be able to repeat the feat,"

sure you are, you just have to do it half-asleep every time, which I'm sure has its uses :)

congrats!

[gina-r-snape.livejournal.com]

Ah,that's awesome!

Being ambidextrous, sometimes these sorts of things look backwards to me and sometimes they don't. So I completely understand. Four-in-hand came intuitively for me when I started wearing ties in the 80s.

btw, just looked up directions for the Half Windsor knot and my eyes are now crossed. :o)

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I used to wear a school tie and now I really have *no* idea what the knot I used for it was called. And the instructions on Wikipedia will probably only make more sense when I engage my visual brain a bit more.

[gina-r-snape.livejournal.com]

I think you have to have the tie in-hand to make sense of the directions. I'm soooo gonna try to do one now.

I used to like wearing ties when I was younger. But with my ginormous cup size, I suspect they look rather stupid on me now.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

The half-windsor has been passed from father to son in my family for generations now. It was well after college that I learned that everyone else was doing something else; I just assumed they had somehow been doing the half-windsor badly to come up with such an asymmetrical mess.

The only way I've ever learned to tie new knots is with the system described in The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie). It takes five minutes of fussing to figure out how to translate Li Ro Ci Lo Ri Co T into hand movements, but once you do you can easily make modifications for left-handedness and make all fourteen "useful" knots (some of which didn't exist in nature until the mathematical paper that laid out these results, and at least one of which has been described as the most superior IIRC).

[marcmagus]

OMG, thank you for linking to that book. I read one of their papers, loved it, it helped me think better about knots, and I was thrilled someone had done it. I was just thinking about trying to track the paper down and link to it for this discussion.

I had no idea they'd published their ideas further in book form. That's going directly on my to-buy list. Thank you!

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

Heh, I'm the same. A biologist friend passed along a photocopy of their original Nature article as I'm both a mathematician and the only person amongst our colleagues who knew how to tie a bow tie. I'm glad that someone on Wikipedia added the Fink-Mao sequence to the half windsor page or I wouldn't have been able to make the connection either without figuring out which pile that paper was in.

[abnormal-apathy.livejournal.com]

I have had to google knot tying for special events because I'm pretty much useless when it comes to such things.

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

heh, i STILL cannot tie a necktie, in any knot
i've tried!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

A properly tied tie should look just imprecise enough to show that your valet, batman or head butler didn't tie it for you, so I'm thinking it looks splendid on you, and that there must be pictures sometime...

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I learned to tie my ties with a half-windsor, and resisted the four-in-hand for many years. However, I've learned that wearing a well-tied four-in-hand can have some advantages. Especially in the business community. (Where the half-windsor makes people nervous.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

(Where the half-windsor makes people nervous.)

Speak to me of this.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's a reverse snob thing. In some places a half-windsor is taken to mean that the wearer is *too* concerned with his appearance. If suits and ties are the uniform, a four-in-hand knot says, "I'm really just a good old boy, but I put on these fancy duds because the boss says I have to."

[rm.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaaaah. So really the same reaction I have about the British folks in finance, just, as a bad thing instead of "thank god someone knows how to dress."

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Probably so, yeah. Also, look at popular politicians. I bet anything Obama knows how to tie a half-windsor, but he always ties his ties with a four-in-hand.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I also always notice the dimple on his ties, which is a hassle to do with a four-in-hand, and as I discovered today just happens with the HW, which made me very happy.

[missdeanna.livejournal.com]

That's awesome! I can't remember if it's the half windsor or windsor that I tried and failed at when I first tried to learn, but I know it was one of them and that I sucked at it. But then, I suck at knots, period. It took me a while to learn the four-in-hand, even.

[meirion.livejournal.com]

There's a benefit to having to wear school uniforms with a tie, then ... I learnt the FIH aged 4. The Windsor I taught myself a month or so back.