Dear Mr. Smith: As a female with the onerous responsibility of dressing a male who must look polished and professional, I am challenged by decisions and choices pertaining to the tie: Is it okay to wear ties of varying widths? Is there an "in" width? Is any pattern or colour acceptable? In short, is there anything particularly hot or, more importantly, passé? My guy is at my mercy. He basically wears what I buy for him and put on him. But I sometimes have moments of self-doubt and fear that I am sending him out into the world looking inappropriate or, even worse, dated.
Answer:What a troubling letter. Why is your guy at your mercy? Why does he let you dress him? Are you happy with this vision of masculinity? And is he happy in the role of helpless child?
I get many letters like this from women, asking about how to better control their men. They tend to contain a certain pride and in that pride I see a certain condescension. The pride is not only about having a superior fashion sense, but also about having such a submissive mate. And in this control there is a barely hidden scorn toward men and their adorable, virile, insensitive lack of aesthetic capacities. There's always a little wink in there about how easy it is to manipulate these big dumb creatures.
So I can't help wondering if many women really secretly want to keep their mates that way. Let's face it: We all have, buried somewhere, an atavistic desire for comforting, simple gender roles.
So, yes, I can tell you about ties, but I would rather tell him. If he is not interested, then I would rather he become interested than let himself be outfitted like a Boy Scout before summer camp.
Anyway, this is what I would tell him: I am still wearing a number of my wider ties - that is, no wider than nine centimetres - but I make sure not to wear them with suits with extremely narrow lapels. For that I am wearing ties that go as narrow as seven centimetres. Current conservative fashion is producing ties that are about eight centimetres wide.
Members of the advanced class may match stripes with stripes, but it takes confidence - make sure the stripes of the shirt and tie are of very different widths. It's simpler to match a striped tie with a solid shirt and a patterned tie (checks or florals, say) with a striped shirt. There is no particular trend in tie patterns right now: They're still all over the place. Which is very useful - it means that you don't have to throw out any of your old ones.
By the way, I saw a mop-headed art student the other day clad in jeans, scruffy running shoes, a plaid cowboy shirt and a skinny black tie - loose, of course. He looked like a clown. It broke my heart: Ties are things of delicate beauty, not jokes. Ask Mr. Smith a question, or view the complete archive, at Russell Smith's online advisory service, DailyXY.com .