The tie is dead in the mainstream. And yet it's coming back.

The tie is dead in the mainstream. The version we know from films and television, from the fifties and sixties through to the eighties and nineties, is finished, almost as dead as the hat of the 1920s. It will never return in that form. Still, it is making a comeback, and that is not entirely unexpected. It has been building for a few years now.

Why was the tie so unpopular for generations, and why do we hardly see it in everyday life now? The simple answer is compulsion, and that is what I want to get into here. Anyone who was forced to wear a tie was the first to throw it off as soon as they had the chance. And since it is an annoying accessory with no real function, it was the first thing to go. That is what caused its decline: being forced 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 am going on about is real. It is not wishful thinking from someone who owns too many ties and wants to sell them as well. Depop reports that tie sales were up 31 per cent in late 2025, and in spring 2026 ties appeared on the catwalks of the big houses, Dior, Hermès and Saint Laurent. An industry analysis sums up Gen Z's attitude like this: less corporate dress code, more I chose this because it looks cool. That is exactly what we are seeing in our own bubble too. There is a growing group of people who simply fancy wearing a tie.

Reactance: why compulsion poisoned the tie

Reactance is a term everyone has heard at some point, and you come across it in all sorts of ways in everyday life. It comes from psychology, from Jack Brehm, who described in the sixties what happens when you take away someone's freedom to choose. Resistance sets in, directed mainly at the compulsion itself, at the feeling that your freedom to decide has been restricted. You can see it even in small children. That is why the simple trick of giving a child the illusion of a choice works: you do not say “put your shoes on now”, you say “would you rather wear the blue ones or the red ones?”

Being made to wear a tie was a textbook case. Every morning, millions of men had to put one on because the dress code required it. An irritating task, repeated day after day, with no point to it as far as they could see. Fertile ground for resistance. That compulsion is gone, and that gives the tie a chance. It took the blame for the compulsion, and once the compulsion disappears, the resistance has nothing left to push against. Suddenly, you can look at a tie as an accessory again, without that prejudice.

First the dislike, then the excuse

Now comes the counterargument: no, the tie is not coming back. Surely there were good, rational reasons to reject it. It is uncomfortable and stuffy too. These are the same excuses T-shirt devotees give when you suggest they try wearing a shirt. But in my view, they are not the real reasons at all.

Jonathan Haidt has a formula for this in The Righteous Mind. It operates below the level of awareness and is strongly influenced by your in-group: intuition comes first, reasoning follows. His image is an elephant with a rider on top. The elephant is your gut feeling and plods wherever it wants. The rider is your mind, which imagines it is steering. Most of the time, it is only along for the ride, then comes up with a neat explanation for why that was the right direction all along. Someone once put it more bluntly: “Human beings are not rational, they are rationalising.” First the snap decision, then the rationalisation of why it was sensible all along. It would be hard to bear otherwise. If you constantly had to admit that most of your decisions were not particularly well thought out, and sit down every evening to conclude that you had made a mess of 95 per cent of your day, your ego would be in pieces.

Applied to the tie, this means the dislike came first. It was passed on within the group too, because negative attitudes spread through a group. But that effect has faded over time, since the compulsion has been gone for twenty years. The negative feeling has run out of steam.

Why moods are contagious

But why are moods contagious in the first place? I have taken that for granted so far, but there is evidence for it. How does the opposite trend emerge from the people who got rid of the tie? There is an experiment from social psychology for that too. Solomon Asch gave his subjects a ridiculously easy task: which of three lines was the same length as a fourth? But there were a few people in the room who were in on the experiment, and they all named the same wrong line. Sure enough, around a third of the real participants went along with the obvious nonsense. Better to be wrong with the group than right on your own.

From an evolutionary point of view, that is not stupid. In the past, being cast out of your group left you in a bad position. Group cohesion is wired so deeply into the brain that you adjust your opinion to match the group even when, deep down, you know it is wrong. Pure survival instinct. During the years of compulsion, the dislike of ties was there, and it spread to many others. Someone who did not really mind ties would eventually pick up their colleagues' grumbling. Today, though, there are small groups of people who enjoy them, and the reflex works the other way round. Enthusiasm is contagious, just as the grumbling was twenty years ago.

A useless thing, and that is the appeal

That leaves the question of why a group of people now enjoy wearing a useless item of clothing. Why do something voluntarily when nobody demands it and it serves no purpose? A tie has no practical function to begin with. It does not keep you warm or protect you from anything, and an open collar would do the same job. Most of classic menswear is pure decoration anyway, as Derek Guy says, and he is right. That does not hurt its case. That is precisely the fun of it.

In classic menswear, a man has surprisingly little room for personal choice, especially if he likes to keep things restrained. I know many of you here are quite happy with less restrained outfits, but even within a restrained look you can go to town with a tie. That is the cool part. Trousers, shirts and jackets come in a thousand variations of grey, blue, green and beige, with plenty of patterns on top, but let's be honest: the tie offers many times more. With a tie, almost anything is fair game. It is the centrepiece of every outfit. It forms a vertical line down the middle of your body and, apart from your face, it is where the other person's gaze settles. That is what makes it interesting.

What I see out on the street

I am on brand and wear a tie most days of the week. Usually with separates at the office, but I also wear one to the bakery in the morning, take the tram in one and used to commute that way. Then there is my rather conspicuous beard. So I am not a perfectly clean test case, but my observation is clear all the same. I get a lot of looks from strangers, though most of them are not negative. In several years, I have never had a negative comment in public. If anything, I get positive reactions.

Those range from genuine compliments, which men rarely hear from strangers in public anyway, to a sense that people trust me before they even know me. I am noticeably more likely to be asked for help, for directions or for advice than when I am out without a jacket and tie. People see you more positively in a tie, as more trustworthy. That fits the overall theory. The old reflex of tie equals compulsion, all the negative baggage of the past few decades, has apparently faded. What remains is the response to someone who has visibly made a choice. That free choice is rewarded and, because it is not being forced on anyone, it is not punished.

Give it a go

I do not want to make more of this than it is. The tie will probably never return to the mainstream completely; it will remain a niche. But that niche is growing, and that is one reason I am writing this at all: I want to share my enthusiasm. The tie is one of the most thoroughly dead accessories there has ever been. Its decline is beyond description. Perhaps only the hat fell further, and honestly, I do not give it much chance of a serious revival. If you give the tie a chance, you have something to be pleased about: people respond well to what you are doing, and sharing your own enthusiasm may have a stronger effect than we think right now. Hopefully, we are still right at the beginning.

So if you already wear one: congratulations, you were early. And if you are not there yet, ask yourself what is behind your discomfort. Do you simply not fancy it? Or is there still a fear of negative comments from your in-group, because somewhere at the back of your mind you have this vague sense that people disapprove of ties for reasons that go back twenty years? From my own experience, I can tell you: you will not die if you do something different from your group.