A Tie with a Windsor Knot

One of my great literary and movie heroes is James Bond - mainly for his daring do, cheeky wit and of course his ability to always his beat the bad guys while maintaining sartorial elegance. However, recently I read Ian Fleming's novel 'From Russia With Love' which features Bond whisking a beautiful Russian agent and the Specktor Cryptography Machine out of Turkey. The title of Chapter 25 is 'A Tie with a Windsor Knot'. At this point in the book Bond meets the Russian hit man Donovan 'Red' Grant who has been sent to kill Bond. When they first meet the description of Grant goes as such:

"The man had taken off his mackintosh. He was wearing an old reddish-brown tweed coat with his flannel trousers, a pale yellow Viyella summer shirt, and the dark blue and red zigzagged tie of the Royal Engineers. It was tied with a Windsor knot. Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity. It was often the mark of a cad."
                                                                                                              Fleming, pages 272-3

As a man who almost always ties his tie with a Windsor knot as well as one who admires Bond I was put in a difficult and worrisome position. Should one of my style gurus dictate how I wear my tie or should I be true to myself and wear my tie in a way which I feel comfortable?

In the last few years as I have developed and grown my tie collection I have graduated from using the School-boy or Four-in-hand knot to the Half-Windsor knot or Windsor knot to tie my ties. I have done this because I've felt it gives me the neatest, most symmetrical knot possible to look good at work. Occasionally I have used a Victoria knot to tie my tie as well but often this knot has looked small and thin inside the wide collared shirts which I wear. Most of the shirts which I have purchased in the last five to ten years have had the wide collar. This has meant that the most suitable tie knot for the shirts I have been wearing have been best suited to the Windsor knot. When I think about this it has also meant I have more often than not chosen ties which are a little wider and I've ignored the skinnier ties that I own.

Recently though the skinny tie has been making a bit of a comeback and they are more and more available at retail stores when shopping. They've become more and more fashionable of late and I've even bitten the bullet, to stay with the current fashion, and brought a couple of them myself. But with the skinny ties there has also been more and more need for narrower collars. This led to me also purchasing this year some shirts with the narrow collar. I have avoided the button down variety as they remind me too much of being a youngster in the late 80s and early 90s where they seemed to be only available shirt where I was growing up. So I've now got narrower collars which are more suitable for the skinny ties. However, the knot which I use to tie these ties can't be a Windsor because it's too fat. That means to stick with fashion I have to develop my knot tieing skills to tie a more suitable knot to go with the narrow collar.

Is it perhaps because of the fashion of the times that James Bond disliked Donovan Grant's choice of a Windsor knot so much? I now have to expand the number of ways in which I tie my tie. In the post World War II era into which Fleming created Bond the Windsor knot had been popularised by American servicemen. As a traditional English gentleman Bond would have found the popularity of the American servicemen threatening to his own charms with the ladies. Hence his thoughts on vanity and caddish behaviour.

So where does all this leave me in choosing how I'm going to tie a tie? I think I just have to really expand the ways in which I can tie a tie. Thanks to my brother who sent me the link to Thomas Fink's website (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~tmf20/index.shtml) which has 85 ways to tie a tie. I'm now varying the way in which I tie my tie each day dependent on the collar style I have each day.

So thanks to Bond and the 'From Russia With Love' Windsor tie quandary I've expanded my knowledge of how to tie a tie. Which now only leaves the quandary from the movie version of the book where Bond begins to suspect that Grant is on the wrong side.... should I have the red or the white burgundy with my fish?

Bibliography:
Fleming, I.; From Russia With Love, Penguin Books, Camberwell, 2010