The Necktie Is Dead in the Mainstream. Nevertheless, It's Coming Back.

The necktie is dead in the mainstream. As we know it from films and television from the fifties and sixties to the eighties and nineties, it's over, almost as dead as the hat from the twenties. In this form, it will never return. Nevertheless, it's making a comeback, and that's not entirely unexpected; it's been brewing for several years.

Why was the necktie so unpopular for generations, and why is it hardly worn in everyday life today? The simple answer is coercion, and that's exactly what I'll address here. Anyone who was forced to wear a necktie was, of course, the first to discard it as soon as the opportunity arose. And because it's an annoying accessory with no real function, it was the first thing to be left out. That was the reason for its downfall: the compulsion to wear it. But the same mechanism that killed it is now bringing it back. Slowly, step by step.

There Are Numbers

The comeback I'm raving about here is real, and it's not wishful thinking from someone who owns too many ties and wants to sell them besides. Depop reports that by the end of 2025, tie sales will have risen by 31 percent, and at the major fashion houses, Dior, Hermès, and Saint Laurent, ties were seen on the runway in spring 2026. An industry analysis summarizes the Gen Z attitude as: less corporate dress code, more I chose this because it looks cool. We observe exactly that in our own bubble as well. There's a growing group of people who are simply enthusiastic about it.

Reactance: Why Coercion Poisoned It

Reactance is a term everyone has heard of, and in everyday life, it comes in all shapes and colours. It comes from psychology, from Jack Brehm, who described in the sixties what happens when someone's free choice is taken away. Resistance arises, and it is primarily directed against the coercion itself, against the feeling of being restricted in one's freedom of decision. This can be observed even in toddlers. That's why the simple trick of giving a child the illusion of choice works: You don't say "put on your shoes now," but "would you prefer the blue ones or the red ones?"

The tie compulsion was exactly such a textbook case. Every morning, millions of men had to put on a tie because the dress code required it. An annoying task, new every day, without seeing any sense in it. Fertile ground for resistance. This compulsion no longer exists, and that is the tie's chance. It got the blame for the compulsion, and if the compulsion disappears, the resistance runs into nothingness. Suddenly, one can again view a tie impartially as an accessory.

First the Aversion, Then the Excuse

Now comes the counter-argument: No, the tie is not coming back; there were good, rational reasons against it. It was uncomfortable and stuffy to boot. These are the same excuses T-shirt proponents make when you suggest they wear a shirt. But these are, in my opinion, by no means the true reasons.

Jonathan Haidt has a formula for this in The Righteous Mind, and it runs subconsciously, strongly driven by your ingroup: First comes the intuition, the justification comes afterward. His image for this is an elephant with a rider on top. The elephant is the gut feeling and ambles wherever it wants. The rider is your intellect, and he imagines he's steering, but in reality, he usually just rides along and then provides the nice explanation for why it should have gone there anyway. Someone once put it even more directly: Man is not a rational being, but a rationalizing one. First the impulsive action, then the rationalization why this impulsive action was actually sensible. Otherwise, it would be almost unbearable. If you constantly had to admit that most of your own decisions are not particularly well-thought-out, and sit down every evening and realize that you messed up 95 percent of the day, that would break your ego.

Applied to the tie, this means: First there was the aversion, also inherited within the group, because negative attitudes are contagious within a group. But this contagion has subsided over time, because the compulsion has not been in force for twenty years. The negative feeling has dissipated.

Why Moods Are Contagious

But why are moods contagious at all? I just assumed that, but it's an observation that can be substantiated. How do the people who abolished the tie become the reverse trend? There's also an experiment from social psychology for that. Solomon Asch presented his test subjects with a ridiculously easy task: Which of three lines is as long as a fourth? But there were a few insiders in the room who all named the same wrong line. And promptly, about a third of the real participants joined in with the obvious nonsense. Better to be wrong with the group than to be right alone.

Evolutionarily, this isn't stupid, because those who were cast out of their group used to have a hard time. The cohesion of the group is so deeply wired in the brain that one adapts one's opinion to the group, even though one basically knows it is wrong. A pure survival instinct. In the years of compulsion, there was an aversion to the tie, and it spread to many. Those who didn't really care about the tie eventually adopted their colleagues' grumbling. Today, however, there are small groups who enjoy it, and there the reflex works exactly the other way around. Enthusiasm is contagious, just like the grumbling twenty years ago.

A Useless Thing, And That's Exactly the Appeal

It remains to be clarified why a group of people now enjoy wearing a useless piece of clothing. Why do you voluntarily do something that no one demands and that serves no purpose? A tie initially brings no functionality. It doesn't keep you warm, it doesn't protect you from anything, an open collar would do the same job. Most things in classic menswear are pure decoration anyway, says Derek Guy, for example, and he's right. But that doesn't harm the cause, that's precisely the point.

In classic men's fashion, a man can decide surprisingly little, especially if he prefers a subdued style. I know many here are also open to less subdued outfits, but even within a subdued framework, you can fully indulge yourself with a tie. That's exactly what's cool about it. While there are a thousand variations of trousers, shirts, and blazers in grey, blue, green, and beige, plus a lot of patterns, let's be honest: The tie surpasses that many times over; everything is pretty much fair game with it. It is the centerpiece of every outfit. It sits like a vertical line in the middle of your body and is, besides your face, what your counterpart's gaze holds onto. That's exactly what makes it interesting.

What I Experience on the Street

Of course, I am on brand and wear a tie most days of the week. In the office, usually with a combination, but I also go to the bakery with it in the morning, ride the tram, and used to commute like that. Plus my rather striking beard. So I'm not a perfectly clean test case, but my observation is still clear. I get a lot of stares from strangers, but they are usually not negative. I have never received a negative comment in several years in public. If anything, then positive feedback.

And these range from genuine compliments, which men rarely hear from strangers in public anyway, to a kind of trust bonus. I am noticeably more often asked for help, for directions, for advice, than when I am out without a jacket and tie. With a tie, you are perceived more positively, more trustworthy. This fits well with the overall theory. The old reflex, tie equals compulsion, all the negative connotations of the last decades, has apparently faded, and what remains is the reaction to someone who has visibly made a decision. This free decision is rewarded, and because it is forced on no one, it is not punished.

Dare to

I don't want to make the matter bigger than it is. The tie will probably never fully return to the mainstream; it will remain a niche. But the niche is growing, and that's one of the reasons I'm writing this at all: I want to share my enthusiasm. In the tie, we see one of the deadest accessories there ever was. The downfall is indescribable; only the hat perhaps had a harder one, and frankly, I don't give it much chance of a serious revival. Those who embrace the tie can be happy: what they do is well received, and sharing one's enthusiasm might be more powerful than we currently think. Hopefully, we are still at the very beginning.

So, if you already wear one: Congratulations, you were early. And if you're not there yet, then ask yourself what your discomfort is actually about. Do you just not feel like it? Or is there still the fear of getting negative comments from your ingroup, because you vaguely have in the back of your mind that people reject the tie, for reasons that go back twenty years? From my own experience, I can tell you: You won't die if you do something different from your group.