![]() You hear that same engagingly self-mocking voice in his tell-all book too, in stories about travelling from his childhood in the Black Country, through his pre-Slade scuffing bands during the 1960s - into his vital role in the over-the-top sartorial excesses of glam-rock, and its aftermath. I was screaming when I hit daylight," - that accent is still as distinctively rich across the years. And although today Noddy's sideboards might be sparser, his outfit less flamboyant - purple shirt, long black drape jacket, stretch-side black boots, with his gold-rimmed spectacles worn Larry Grayson-style on black expander-twine around his neck, when he says "I was born being rowdy. In the accent, all the way from Walsall - just north of Brum - which transmutes 'kipper tie' into 'cup of tea'. The secret, of course, is in the telling. Then the assistant says "would sir like a kipper tie?" I reply "Not 'alf, I'm parched. I try on a pair of gold lame loon pants, and I'm admiring them in the mirror when the assistant asks if I'd like to try on a silver shirt too, which I do, and that looks fantastic too. "It's set in 1974 and I'm playing the Pop Star, shopping in a trendy boutique. So right here, right now, Noddy gleefully re-tells the story against himself. He calls it his 'Noddy Holder' joke, right?" Right. Now turning away from it to a wider silhouette, is the most rebellious thing to do.NODDY HOLDER interviewed by Andrew Darlington ![]() But more likely, as soon as the skinny tie became the norm, it lost the sting of its subversive power. So is the return to the bigger, wider tie symptomatic of a move to a new conservativism? Possibly. “As a result men are once again returning to ties which are wider than those which were favoured around a decade ago.” “Double-breasted suits and wider peak lapels have become more popular in men’s tailoring recently and this requires a wider blade width tie to counterbalance,” says Field. The younger more idealistic generation didn’t wear skinny ties with Stan’s wider paisley tie being a highlight of the later seasons. ![]() But as the show aged and moved into the late 60s the skinny tie style became less dominate. The patterns and shades nodded to the Ivy League and the preppy office look defined the show’s early seasons. In Mad Men, the coloured, tightly knotted ties of Don Draper and Roger Sterling were the centrepiece of their conservative coloured suits. The look invaded the high street via Topman. “From high-end to the high street, skinny ties completely dominated.” Former boarding school boy Julian Casablancas and his band the Strokes wore their ties boy scout tight. “In the early-mid 2000s, Heidi Slimane’s tenure at Dior had a massive influence on the design of ties,” says Alex Field, Reiss’ head of menswear design. In the early noughties when the indie-scruff look went high fashion, the skinny tie was a trademark piece. While Prince nodded to the look on the cover of his Controversy album, with a micro skinny tie worn as part of his 2 Tone ska influence outfit.Ī decade later, the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs strutted down the road, in black suits, proving the skinny tie was still a signifier of anti-establishment tailoring. While on the cover of Parallel Lines, the male members of Blondie accessorised their ruler wide ties with Converse and cartoonish expressions. Patti Smith appeared on the cover of Horses in a photo shot by Robert Mapplethorpe in a slim fitting man’s suit wearing an untied tie. Punk and New Wave, re-cast the tie as a stylistic symbol of DIY culture and anti-capitalism in its thinnest and skinniest form. Historically, the wide tie has been associated with conformity, the establishment and latterly corporate greed and betrayal. The shift away from the thin to the wide can be seen as ideological. ![]()
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