Neckties & Collars

The 19th Century American man had a considerable choice of necktie styles--and many working class types did without them entirely.

By far the most common was the small, black, tidy bow tie, but various forms of cravat, from the Windsor, to the Ascot, found their way onto American throats.

He also wore a wide variety of collars: some removable, some attached, some starched, some soft and some hardly there at all.

This fine looking young man from the 1890s is wearing a Windsor tie, in patterned silk, tucked in after a fashion that seems to have been popular in the US (I have seen several examples of it).

His collar is the winged style often called "Patricide", based on a fictitious story that a young man returned from university wearing the new style starched collar (new in the 1850s). When his father embraced him, the points on the collar cut his father's throat.

This, of course, never happened but the story was enough to name the collar. This style was frequently worn with frock suits, morning suits and evening wear (he seems to be wearing a morning suit). It was seldom worn with sack suits.

Stiff collars were usually removable, so they could be washed and starched apart from the shirt, and thrown away when they became worn, while the shirt could remain in service for years to come.

Removable collars were usually made of linen. Cheap paper and then celluloid collars came on the market at the end of the 19th Century.