Why Is Everyone Tucking Their Ties Into Their Pants?
Prep is officially the mode du jour in menswear. As the Ivy’s sartorial codes have crept deeper and deeper into our wardrobes, so has our fluency in the genre’s once ineffable signatures. Take the standard country-club combination of a collared shirt layered underneath a V-neck sweater: a pairing that is traditionally presented neatly, with the shirt pressed, tucked, and buttoned almost to the top. (A fully fastened placket tends to feel costumey.) The classic prep presentation tends to feel prescriptive—or at least, it used to.
Now that one can contain prep multitudes, an ultra-stuffy detail that has emerged from this prep identity crisis is the tie tuck—otherwise known as when you tuck the end of your tie right into the waistband of your trousers.
Though the quirk predates any of our modern designers’ output, in the fashion world, newly appointed creatives such as Michael Rider for Celine and Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford have presented undone versions of these prescribed dress codes by way of intentional carelessness: brattily half-tucked collars; tangled sweaters not resting, but rather slothfully lounging, on the tops of models’ shoulders. Designers’ interpretations have also unfolded in the opposite direction, sending looks down the runway that contained both rule-breaking and conformity. (The top half of a particularly chaotic number from Dario Vitale’s Versace debut encompasses this sensibility rather superfluously: a patterned tie peeking out from a buttoned-down shirt collar and into a pair of belted, but unzipped leather pants.) And one man who easily—and consistently—toggles between both prep polarities within a singular look? The designer Thom Browne, who’s been tucking in his ties for ages.
The dapper detail recently found its way into celebrity styling. Recently, actor Adam Scott wore a high-waisted gray Thom Browne suit—complete with suspenders and a slightly askew skinny tie fixed with a clip, tucked cleanly into pleated trousers—to an Emmys party. The pre-packaged feel of a tucked-in tie even felt like a thematic choice for Scott, who portrays a corporate drone in the Apple TV+ hit, Severance. Elsewhere in Hollywood, actors Gwyneth Paltrow and Teyana Taylor have both deployed the tie tuck, though the styling trick feels a bit more trendy (as opposed to slapstick) on a woman.
And unfortunately, the risk factor for slapstick is high here: Tucking your necktie into your waistband could also be considered a sloppy oversight or user error, the proverbial egg on one’s face. Doing so might give the impression that your tie is too long and thus you keep accidentally tucking it into your pants—or, worse, that you recently had to unzip to use the restroom. (Traditionally, a tie should land right above the belt buckle.) Yet it also feels like the mark of an overly fastidious mind. Think: a misanthropic mathematician who doesn’t want his tie dangling over his proofs, or the eccentric Italian industrialist and former head of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, who was known for his sprezzatura, which notably manifested in his tie styling. A tucked-in tie looks especially meticulous on King Charles III, a prep progenitor himself.
Indeed, a tie tuck feels distinctly tabula rasa for the archetypal preppie, like he emerged hot off the 3D-printer at the preppie factory with his hair parted to the side at just the right angle, his loafers spick and span (with a color-matched belt to boot), and his tie tucked right into his trousers. It feels box-fresh in a sweet, albeit somewhat offbeat, head-tilting sort of way. All of which is to say, well, try this one at your own risk.
