The Grenadine Tie: Everyone Recommends It, Nobody Wears It

Anyone looking to buy their first good tie has been getting the same answer for a good ten years: a grenadine, in navy. It is in every essentials list, it is in every capsule and it always sits in the same spot. Put This On summed up the consensus in a single sentence back in 2014, and the first word is already the admission:

"As conventional wisdom goes, grenadines are some of the most useful ties you can own."

Except that something struck me along the way, and I haven't been able to shake it since. I don't see them. Not in everyday life, not on people who know their stuff, not even at Pitti, where everyone wears everything. And I couldn't name a single shop in Cologne where I could walk in and buy one today. Cologne is one of the largest cities in Germany.

The last time I saw one around someone else's neck was on Julius. He does, however, own a sample of my ties. So my n of one doesn't count. I pushed it there myself.

That is a strange position for a piece that has been the first recommendation for years. I've come to think the recommendation is right and still bad, because it sells the grenadine for the wrong job. What the right one is takes a few paragraphs. There are two of them.

The short version, if that's all you wanted

Grenadine is not a material but a weave. More precisely, a leno weave, in which two warp threads are twisted around the weft. The result is an open, lattice-like fabric that looks like a plain tie from two metres away and like knitwear from one. So the pattern isn't a pattern, it's structure. Broadly, there are two kinds: garza fina, fine and smoother, and garza grossa, coarser and clearly visible.

The fabric is woven on old shuttle looms. Ascot in Krefeld, where ties have been made since 1908, writes on its own site that only two mills in Italy can still do it, partly on looms from the 1920s, and that a metre of fabric takes an hour of work. Whether it is exactly two, I can't count. That there are very few is beyond dispute.

What only the grenadine can do

It is toned down and still has sheen and plenty of structure, both at once. No other tie has that. The knitted tie has the structure, and in silk it even has sheen, but it is too casual for anything beyond a jacket and trousers. Satin has only the sheen. Prints have other things, colour and pattern, in other words information. The grenadine is the only tie whose entire content is structure and which stays formal while doing it.

Mostly it comes plain. It exists in stripes too, and I find most of those mediocre: the weave interrupts the stripes, which creates a restlessness, and the tie ends up wanting too much at once. There are stripes that work on it, but the ones you see most often aren't among them.

Silk shines, and sheen is coded formal. The open weave is texture, and texture is coded casual. Because the grenadine has both, it sits in the middle of both scales and goes with a business suit as well as with a tweed jacket without looking wrong at either end. That property is exactly what put it on every list. And that property is exactly where the reasoning on the list goes wrong.

The recommendation is not a con

Before anyone expects a reckoning with the menswear bubble: no. People buy things because people they grant authority to teach them that a thing is good, and often enough that is true. I've written about that before, in the piece on why I buy expensive clothes. There is nothing dishonest about it. The question is what reasoning puts the grenadine on the list. Put This On delivered it in two sentences, and they remain the best short version I know:

"Have a patterned shirt and jacket? The solid color helps things not look too busy. Have a solid colored jacket and shirt? The textured weave helps things not look too boring."

That is an honest description, and it holds. But the problem is already in it. Both jobs described there are repairs. The piece evens out what would otherwise go wrong. It brings nothing of its own, it takes something away. And at some point that turned into "goes with everything", the formula by which it is now sold to every beginner as their first tie.

There are two kinds of versatile

Which brings us to the actual point, and it is a problem of vocabulary.

There are two kinds of versatile. One goes with everything because it contributes nothing. The other goes with everything although it contributes something. In everyday speech both get the same word, which is why people talk past each other the moment it gets specific.

Everyone knows the first kind. White trainers are the textbook case. They clash with nothing because they carry no information that anything could clash with. In shirts it is white poplin. These are empty pieces, and empty is not an insult here. A background is supposed to be a background.

The second kind is the more interesting one, and it almost never gets explained. Take a paisley tie. By every pattern-mixing rule it ought to be difficult: a large, organic, loud pattern. In practice it goes with almost everything. Not because paisley is harmless, but because paisley happens on no other garment. There are no paisley trousers, there are practically no paisley jackets, and nobody wears a paisley shirt with a classic jacket and trousers. The tie has the place to itself. Where there is no opponent, there is no need for a rule on how to deal with one.

The same goes for the regimental tie, although at first glance it ought to be the hardest case, because stripes live everywhere, on the shirt, on the suit, on the trousers. But regimental stripes are far wider than pinstripes and far wider than Bengal stripes. They occupy a scale that no shirt occupies. So the place is not only a question of pattern type but of type times scale. The market provides the counter-test: very finely striped ties barely exist, and the few that do look odd. You immediately think someone has tied a shirt around his neck.

Behind this sits an older and simpler idea: figure and ground. The large surfaces, jacket and trousers, are the ground. The small pieces, tie and pocket square, are the figure. A figure needs distance from the ground, or it isn't one. That is exactly why a tie may sit further away than two large surfaces may sit from each other. And that is exactly why it makes a difference whether a piece uses that distance or gives it away.

The plain grenadine gives it away. It has texture, so it doesn't disappear when everything around it is smooth. But it has no information of its own, so it never becomes the figure. It doesn't occupy a place, it fills one. Daniel Hakimi put the principle behind this into one sentence at The Second Button, and I think it is one of the best of recent years:

"The more "versatile" or "neutral" a shoe is, the less it contributes to an outfit."

He is talking about shoes, but the law is the same. And the refinement that matters to me: it is not the versatility that costs the contribution. It is the emptiness. A regimental tie is versatile and still brings a lot with it.

I can run this on myself. My first choice is for the tie to be the loudest piece in the outfit. I almost never wear plain ties, because I always want more going on there. Now picture my typical outfit: a herringbone jacket that is practically plain, because a weave structure is not yet a pattern. A striped or plain shirt. And then a plain grenadine underneath it. It bores me. Properly. Something in me resists.

That outfit is the middle. Not quiet, not loud, a bit of structure, a bit of pattern. That is what an ordinary jacket-and-trousers outfit looks like most of the time, and that is exactly where the grenadine is empty. It repairs nothing, because nothing is broken, and it brings nothing, because it has nothing to bring. In the middle, "goes with everything" means: goes. Nothing more.

The two situations in which it shines

Now for the part the lists leave out. There are two outfits in which the grenadine is not empty but the best choice you have. And the two could not be more opposed.

The first is the deliberately minimal outfit, as a genuine decision. A worsted suit or cotton twill, plain, with that matt, slightly rough hand. Plain shirt. You pull everything else back so that a single piece of structure remains up top, and the grenadine becomes exciting because of it. That is not because it goes with everything. You have given it the whole outfit as ground. Keep to tonal gravity while you do it, and you have a properly elegant outfit, casual and cool at once. Try the alternatives at this point. Satin makes it flat and corporate. A print makes a different outfit of it, a loud one, which is also good, but not this one. The knitted tie produces the same effect, only in the fully casual direction. Here knit and grenadine are siblings, and the grenadine sits one rung higher in the pecking order. If you want casual, take the knit. If you want the thing serious and still alive, only the grenadine remains. A grenadine is still a grenadine.

The other is the opposite: a very loud outfit and, with it, a very dark grenadine as the quiet anchor. This summer, for me, that was a black garza fina, untipped, a vintage find by Polo Ralph Lauren, made in Germany. With it, white cotton-linen fatigues, a mid-blue linen shirt and a blue-and-white seersucker jacket. It works, the black. Black ties work. And I find it almost a shame that I ignored them for so long.

Those are the two situations. Everywhere else there is a better choice. And the fact that a single piece is the best choice in two opposite outfits is its real distinguishing feature. That is in no list. What the list says is "goes with everything", and what it means is the middle, which is precisely the place where the grenadine can do the least.

The crack comes from within

If you go looking for criticism of the grenadine, you find none. I searched my archive for it, a good twelve thousand articles from the English-speaking menswear bubble, and there is not a single piece that attacks the recommendation. That was a shallow search, not proof. But it is a conspicuous nothing.

The only crack comes from the person who helped found the recommendation. In 2017 Simon Crompton answered reader questions, among them which piece in each category gave him the most pleasure. His answer for ties has stood on Permanent Style ever since:

"Ties: Navy big-knot grenadine (boring but true) because it feels like the most conservative thing in the world, yet you rarely see someone wearing one."

"Boring but true" is the middle I described above, written down by someone who knows better than I do. And "you rarely see someone wearing one" is my observation, noted in 2017 in London, where the shops exist. So the problem is not that you couldn't buy one.

Two months earlier the same author had described what he packs for travel: a navy and a black grenadine, and then, verbatim, "to avoid this being too boring, I would chuck in one or two more interesting options". Against his own recommendation he packs a more interesting tie. I don't find that contradictory, I find it honest. It is just not what the essentials lists say.

Why you still don't see any

I think there are two reasons, and the bigger one is the recommendation itself. Whoever buys the grenadine as a first tie because it goes with everything wears it in the middle, because he owns nothing else. There it is boring, and boring things stay in the drawer. Nobody told him about the two outfits in which it shines, and the minimal one is not something a beginner does by accident.

The second reason is retail, at least in Germany. It simply makes no sense to open a shop for this stuff in an ordinary city. A menswear shop with a wall of grenadines in eight colours cannot live on that, so nobody stocks them, and you stand in front of a rack of printed silk. Online, of course, you can get one, a whole page of shops, German ones among them. You just can't touch it first, and nobody explains to you why the thing costs what it costs, or what garza grossa even means.

What speaks against it

I've argued an opinion here, so now the other side, from real people and not as a straw man.

They exist, the people who wear grenadines and love them. In r/ties someone writes under a photo of his brown garza grossa:

"I'm a huge fan of the texture in a grenadine tie. I know they can be finnicky and they're kinda fragile, but if you treat them gently, they're usually worth the effort."

Another, under his first:

"this is my first grenadine tie and I've found they are quite stubborn to tie, they are harder to adjust than smooth silk."

Both are true. The open weave does catch on fingernails, and it ties more stubbornly than smooth silk. That belongs in an honest recommendation and appears in very few.

The most interesting find, though, is a third post, because there someone describes the place rule from above without any theory at all. The same user wears a striped grenadine with a fine grid check shirt and writes:

"I tried the grid shirt today, but probably will stick to plain or stripes in the future: I think the scale of the grenadine weave in the tie is a bit too close to the shirt."

The scale of the weave is too close to that of the shirt. That is the place rule, phrased from wearing it, by a stranger on some random Tuesday. And in passing it shows that the grenadine does not, after all, go everywhere. Structure has a size too.

And then there is the case that convinced me most that the recommendation arrives and just doesn't land. An eighteen-year-old asks the same forum:

"I came across this grenadine tie, and it completely captivated me! The only problem is that I have absolutely no idea how to do it justice."

That is the transmission path in its raw state. The recommendation is there, the fascination is there, the application is missing. And the answer nobody gave him is short: pull everything else back, and it is the piece. Or make it properly loud and take a very dark one. In between, take a different tie.

When to buy one

Buy one if you actually wear one of the two outfits. For the minimal one, navy is the classic; dark brown, dark green or burgundy are at least as good, fina or grossa to taste. For the quiet anchor in a loud outfit, take it very dark, black or a navy that is almost black. Add two occasions where nobody experiments: very formal in silver, and a funeral in black.

If your outfits mostly sit in the middle, a jacket with some structure, a shirt with stripes, then it is not the first tie you buy. Then you are paying for restraint you don't need in that spot, and giving away the one place in the outfit where you can be loud without any risk. Take a regimental or a paisley. They go everywhere just the same, but they don't arrive empty-handed.

And what I do myself

I have some woven. At this point that is no contradiction but the consequence of everything above.

I know the subject, I think the weave is superb, I own some, and for a long time I never warmed to them, because I mostly walk around in the middle and want the loud tie there. I make them anyway, because the two outfits exist and because in them the grenadine is more than the sensible choice. There it is the best one. Nobody tells you that, because the recommendation has been travelling with the wrong sentence for ten years.

What I won't tell you is that it goes with everything and that you therefore never need another. It goes with everything, that much is true. The question I'd rather leave you with is what it actually contributes while it does. Ask it of every piece that is sold to you as versatile. For a surprising number, the honest answer is: nothing. For the grenadine, the answer is: it depends on what you do around it. That is a better answer than it sounds. And the next time you put on one of the two outfits, try it. Then you'll see what I mean.

Frequently asked questions

What is a grenadine tie? A silk tie woven in the grenadine weave, an open leno weave. Two warp threads are twisted around the weft, producing a lattice-like fabric with visible structure. Grenadine is therefore a weave and not a material, and "grenadine fabric" is, strictly speaking, wrong.

Are grenadine ties the best? They are the most versatile, and that is not the same thing. In two outfits they are the best choice: in the deliberately quiet outfit, where the tie is the only piece of structure, and in the loud outfit, where you take a very dark one as the quiet anchor. In everything in between there are more interesting ties that are just as widely wearable.

How formal is a grenadine tie? It sits in the middle and covers a very wide range. It suits business, it suits a jacket and trousers, and for very formal occasions you take it in silver. The fine variant (garza fina) reads more formal, the coarse one (garza grossa) more casual. With jeans, the knitted tie is usually the more natural choice.

What is the difference between garza fina and garza grossa? The fineness of the weave. Garza fina is denser and smoother, looks almost plain from a distance and reads more formal. Garza grossa is more open, the structure is clearly visible, the knot comes out a little fuller and the whole thing reads more casual. Both are a matter of taste, not quality.

Why are grenadine ties so expensive? Because the weave runs on old shuttle looms and is slow. Ascot in Krefeld quotes an hour per metre for its own fabric and names two remaining mills in Italy that can do it. Few suppliers, slow machines, a price to match.

Does a grenadine have to be navy? No, that is convention, not law. Navy is the standard recommendation because it is the least conspicuous against grey and blue. Brown, green and burgundy are at least as useful if your wardrobe holds more brown and green than grey and blue. Black is the choice for the loud outfit and for a funeral.