Tie the Knot

Men don’t wear ties and shops don’t sell them. Having left home without one and needing neckwear to visit my club, I popped into Uniqlo and American Apparel on Kensington High Street  –  no cigar. There was no branch of T M Lewin handy so, reluctantly, I went into TK Maxx.

It is an unlikely port of call for me but if you need to buy a Christmas present for a fastidious friend you might care to follow me through the door. On their website they sell Hardy Amies knitted silk ties for £25, reduced from £115, but the end is V shaped – I like square-cut. (Lewin sell square-cut ones for £35.) This is what I bought for £33 for all three.

Give them away as a present or wear them and spill soup down them. Some things just seem to get cheaper, namely shirts, ties and wine. I still pay the same for wine as I did in the 1980s. Why is this?

I think I know an answer. We lived in a protected economy thirty years ago. There was less international competition. Now, partly because of the EU but more importantly because of cheap international travel we know what it costs to shop overseas and we can shop on the internet. Retailers have accepted this and now, at T M Lewin, you can buy shirts for about £25 – less than half what they cost thirty years ago.

Another retailer, Thomas Pink, does not treat its customers so generously. Thomas Pink is called after a London tailor who made the best hunting coats. It’s where the expression “in the Pink” originated. The name was resurrected by the three Mullen brothers whose family made shirts in Ireland that were sold in shops up and down Jermyn Street. They were frustrated that they sold them cheap and saw them being retailed at a huge mark-up. The rest is history: they made high-quality cotton shirts and sold them cheap, initially from half a shop next door to the Fulham ABC. The company is now part of the LVMH empire. They are classed as luxury shirts and the prices have gone back up to where they were thirty years ago.