Black, Buttermilk, Salmon

Last night (13 March 2007), the 7 o'clock news was a bit late due to the cricket. I was wearing my cap, so the Windies beat Pakistan.

Mahendra appeared in a shiny black suit, an amasi coloured shirt (I guess designers call it buttermilk), and a salmon tie with a massive knot. I don't know of what fabric the suit is made, but it is shiny as hell. The buttonhole on the lapel was crimson (or was it some or other 'button for a cause'? My reception is not perfect...) - as a fellow Mahendra-watcher pointed out, who needs a corsage if you have a crimson buttonhole?

Then there were those large buttermilk cuffs sticking out of the suit-sleeves. I mean, you need some cuff, certainly, but not to the extent that your shirt looks over-sized. And then, what's up with these modern shirts, where the collar, while small/ narrow, is designed with a wide flare? Is it to accommodate those over-sized (super-sized?) tie-knots?

Which brings me to: What's up with those large bladdy knots with which people tie their ties these days? Come on! When I was a kid, the idea was to tie a samoosa-knot: a smallish, neat and tidy equilateral triangle, exactly the size of a decent samoosa (check out these links for samoosa: here, here, here). But the huge knots people use now! With samoosas, I generally steer clear of the big ones - you know, when they're bigger than your hand or, god forbid, bigger than your face. Samoosa is a snack, not a meal, and super-sized samoosa, or any meal for that matter, is obscene and indecent.

So with these bladdy tie-knots - they're obscene. Yes yes, I know, fashion and culture is ever-changing. I don't dispute that, but what does the change mean? These big bladdy knots are a bit bling, aren't they? They seem to want to announce the 'arrival' onto the scene of the wearer. But what scene?

Somewhere back in my academic past, when I was enthralled with the Birmingham School of popular culture studies - i.e. when to study it still mattered as a challenge to traditional academics; i.e. before it became part of the status quo - I may have read a nice little Marxist study on clothes: whenever things become big, it is an expression - by designers and wearers - of wealth. I.e. it's showing off to the world that you can now afford as much fabric in your clothes as the next dolt.

So it seems with these bladdy big-knotted ties.

There is, of course, and as is with everything today, a plethora of information regarding, yes, ties, on the internet. From what I can glean, these big knots seem an evolution of the Windsor Knot, already a knot by which to show off. And, (sigh), everyone has a different bladdy description and definition.

Based on the visual evidence, I would like to call these big knots Pratt Knots (heh heh), but apparently, Pratt Knots (or Shelby Knots) are only semi-wide compared to the Windsor. But I do think that the bladdy big knots make people look like prats, which is what people who wear bling would be if they belonged to the land-owning aristocracy.