Charlie McCreevy is a great innovator. His latest contribution to the global warming debate, his suggestion that the EU Commission could reduce its use of air conditioning if its 12,000 male bureaucrats dispensed with their ties for the summer, is an imaginative application of Power of One thinking. As a follow-up the commission could set up a study on the share of radiated body heat emitted by the neck and breastbone. It could also examine the gender implications of Mr McCreevy's proposal; perhaps women staff should be required to wear ties in winter to reduce the oil bill?
But why such a half-hearted approach? It is strange that our dynamic, radical-thinking commissioner should limit himself to commenting on this redundant piece of apparel's insulating properties. Why not challenge the very necessity for this useless fashion frippery?
Said to owe its 2,000-year-old origins both to ancient Rome's legionaries and China's Quin dynasty (worn by the personal guard of Shih Huang's terracotta army), the tie has nevertheless long had its detractors. Horace and Seneca are reported to have described neckcloths as the mark of the sickly and effeminate. The tie is, in truth, clothing's equivalent of the tonsils, whose survival depends largely on its privileged, protected status as compulsory attire in the modern office and in certain social milieus, a relic signifier of membership of a social elite without any practical function. Such protected status is surely anathema to the iconoclastic commissioner? Not least because the tie is also a health hazard. It risks its owner's entanglement in machines, or provides a handy grab-point for someone bent on assaulting him, is a major vector of disease transmission in hospitals, and can result in vascular constriction if worn with overtight collars. What price power dressing?
Pierre Cardin, inventor of the monstrous flowered tie as well as the phallic kipper tie, was a staunch cravatiste. "Ties can brighten up a male costume and allow the wearer to express his personality," he claimed, a case more perhaps for liberating men from the dreariness of the ubiquitous, conventional business suit.
It is also a human rights issue. A recent report in this paper of the departure of the head of the Wexford opera festival alleged one of the reasons the festival board didn't like him was because he wouldn't wear a tie. But many employers, enlightened to their own interest, have dispensed with a tie requirement. As Balzac pointed out "the least constraint of the body has a corresponding effect in the mind, and ... a tight Cravat will cramp the imagination." Over to you now Charlie.