Guest ties!

Since the beginning of this process I thought it would be fun if I had a "Guest Tie" section, however I thought it weird, especially where I work, and who I meet with, to take snapshots of ties. Yeah, it would be weird. However, I did find two right in our own office and they were proud to pose for me.

Scott's flowers:
Scott works with me and covers foreign affairs (in the places in the world that speak romantic, slavic and germanic languages), the judiciary, telecom and housing, along with some other areas. Scott is from Astoria, and he likes orange. I like Scott for his like for orange. Orange is a hard color, but Scott does really well with it. Scott's tie is by Pronto Uomo. The tie is made of two oranges, one slightly lighter than the other, which disguises a really nice fleur de lis pattern unless the light hits it. It reminded me of the wall paper in the Mansfield Room on the Senate side, and several other rooms of the Capitol. The wall is plain vanilla until a flash of light hits it to reveal a very intricate pattern. Really cool tie.


Dennis's stripes:
Dennis also works with me and the tie I photographed is one that I have been interested in for a long time and is very "Dennis". It's a striped tie made of a series of different stripes over an orange background. The stripes, upon closer inspection - and I have stared - is made out of various colors like gold, purple, a light blue and a dark blue. The really good stripe is made up of a series of circles. Not to disparage the other stripes, they are fine, too. Dennis tied it with a graph checked shirt which works because of the different scales in the pattern - the thinness of the lines work really well. Yes Dennis, I stare at your tie, but don't worry, I listen to every word you say.

This was fun. I should do more of these. Maybe I could just take screen shots off of CSPAN for the more entertaining ties.

Candy Stripes

February 12, 2008:

I hadn't worn this tie for what seems like forever. I had gotten it around the same time as the fun Brooks Brothers striped tie. I think it falls into the same category as that one because it is so out there compared to what you think you would find at Brooks Brothers. Indeed, I found this in the "other" bin on sale and it is labeled "Brooks Brothers Makers" which means that it was made by Brooks Brothers as opposed to for it. The first time I remember wearing this tie was when I took Katherine out to a fancy dinner in the LoDo in Denver. I best thing about this experiment is deciding whether or not I enjoy wearing the tie, and I definitely do enjoy this tie. It definitely brightened up the day.

Banker's stripes and flowers

January 30, 2008:
Today I chose to wear my gray pinstripe JCrew suit with a light blue shirt and a tie by Gianfranco Ferre. The tie was purchased at the Saks 5th Ave outlet in Woodbridge, VA. I bought it on a shopping trip with my sister when she was in town this past fall. The tie is a punchy-orange, with a wispy flower pattern (maybe poppies). I liked the simple, sparse pattern of the flowers and the way that you have to look closely at the tie to see the fact that the flowers look antique in some sort of way, like wallpaper from 1890. I thought it worked well with the power of the chalk stripe of the suit. It's a little banker-ish, and that isn't truly me, but I think that the simple pattern of this tie softens it significantly.

New shirt in the mix

Wednesday, January 23, 2008:
Even though this blog isn't about shirts I decided I would talk about the one I wore today, because I'm proud to have seamlessly added it into the rotation, which is harder to do than one my think. So the shirt was a Christmas present from my best friend, Katherine, and it's from Talbot Men's. It is a blue woven check pattern, but has a skillfully placed orange thread to add a little dimension to the shirt. To match it I didn't go straight to my orange ties, but I decided to find something that brought the same kind of detail to the table, so I chose my red square patterned Ike Bahar that I had purchased at the Nordstrom Men's Half Yearly Sale in 2006 with my friend Danny Ly. I thought it was adventurous to buy a red tie, kind of bold, since I was straying from safe blues and greens and oranges and purples and turquoise.