I Didn’t Buy My Dad a Tie for Father’s Day Because of Donald Trump
I used to have a great deal of respect for a man in a tie. To me, a tie represented poise and success. On my dad, it always looked like a million bucks. It still does. He didn’t wear a tie every day when I was growing up, but when he did I knew he had a big meeting, an important dinner, or we as a family had something to celebrate. He’d wear ties when we’d visit New York from our home in Chicago, and he wore one when he took me to eat at the 21 Club as a wide-eyed 11-year-old, pointing out all of the powerful people in the room and telling me the story, which he often told me, of how Ralph Lauren started out selling ties in the basement of the Empire State Building. Anything is possible, he always said. When I became older, I’d often pick out a special tie for my dad on Father’s Day. It felt like the perfect gift for the man who represented everything that a necktie was supposed to stand for: strength, dapperness, integrity. He loved the blue Façonnable and was beaming when he opened the orange box to reveal a printed style from Hermès. I thought a lot about buying him a tie again this year, maybe from one of his favorite stores like Brooks Brothers or Burberry. Then, it occurred to me that perhaps the tender symbolism had shifted, that men’s ties as we know them might have a whole new meaning in 2018 and not necessarily a positive one either.
Searching for a Father’s Day tie, I couldn’t get the image of Donald Trump’s too-long, too-red version flailing in the wind like a slobbery dog’s tongue out of my head. POTUS’s cheap-looking ties have been the subject of many jabs since he took office last year not least of all because the man actually hawks similar models through one of his many offshoot companies, The Trump Collection. We’ve got a MAGA salesman in a sad tie in the White House, and outside of it there are other high profile men who have given the accessory a bad name too. Take Mark Zuckerberg, swapping his hoodie and flip-flops for a proper suit and tie to testify in front of congress back in April. Are we supposed to believe that he wasn’t complicit in the sharing of millions of Facebook users’ information just because he decided to dress like a grown-up for a couple of days? Using a crisp suit and new tie to mask dirty deeds isn’t going to work for the long run. The public’s trust has been violated. Same goes for the FBI suit himself, Mr. James Comey, or as The New York Times called him, the man who still dresses like a classic “G-Man.” He may have come clean in his book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, and bravo to him for doing so, but in light of recent accusations of his own use of a personal email server to conduct official business after accusing Hillary Clinton of doing the same, can we take him seriously?
One of the most important things my dad taught me was to be aware of other people’s bottom line. What’s the catch? What are they really trying to sell you? Ties are still worn by a lot of great men (miss you Barack and Joe), but in light of the very public showings of how neckties can be used to try and divert people’s attention from the lawlessness of the men wearing them, I can’t in good conscience gift one for Father’s Day. This year, I decided to get him a set of personalized golf balls. They are printed with the slogan he used on a poster board when he ran for high school class president: “Robert Bobb Will Do the Job.” Tie or no tie he always did, and with a lot of heart too.
