Fashion Gallery

The 80s brought us many inexplicable fashion choices. But I find few of them as puzzling - or as iconic - as the piano key necktie.

(In the year 2010 we may not have flying cars, but we have ACTUAL piano neckties, with more processing power than twenty Apple ][ computers, which play actual piano notes when touched, and cost a mere ten bucks. Pwned!)

Apparently some designer early in the 1980s tilted their head to the side and thought, "You know, a necktie is kind of the same shape as a piano's keyboard." Except not really, because a necktie is necktie-shaped with points at both ends. A necktie is also longer in proportion to its width than a keyboard.

This width problem was exacerbated by the fad for skinny ties. You combine a skinny necktie with a piano keyboard pattern, and you're in for a lot of trouble.

One reason the piano keyboard design was appealing at the time was the fad for bold, linear graphics. Black and white was a very popular color combination, as well. You take a design with the strong bold lines of a Mondrian painting, couple it with the black and white color combination (seen in everything from Italian design to zebra stripe leggings) and you had a winner.

Keyboards were also very much in the public consciousness thanks to the rise of New Wave music, which put keyboardists front and center in the burgeoning electronic music scene. And let us not forget the wearable synthesizer, which could be wielded with the same amount of bravado as an electric guitar.

It makes sense, then, that a keyboard pattern would become popular. But why, for pity's sake, in necktie form?

The 1980s saw a lot of young men trying to break free of the fashion constraints of the past. At the same time, if you didn't want to look like a preppy Republican, you didn't have many options. New Wave was one of the few fashion choices left, and it had the tongue in cheek sensibility that today we associate with hipsters. The 1980s saw not only the piano key tie but the "t-shirt that looks like a tuxedo," and the "necktie painted to look like a fish."

Things that look like other things: how droll!

Men's New Wave fashion choices spent a lot of time playing with the Republican "suit and tie" conventions of dress. Think of the New Romantic look, which paired a black suit coat with a frilly shirt underneath. Not to mention the fashion for rolling back the sleeves of a suit jacket into cuffs, a fashion seen from A-Ha's breakthrough video "Take On Me" to Miami Vice.

Then there was A Flock of Seagulls, of course. For what that's worth.

Strangely, out of all the crazy-ass fashions of the 1980s, the piano key necktie has become an icon of the time. It remains a sentimental and/or tongue in cheek favorite, from contemporary artwork to Halloween costumes - and the piano tie was even name-checked in the 2001 movie "Zoolander" when Zoolander's rival Mugatu bragged "I invented the piano key necktie!"

Photo credit: Flickr/ToriMBC

If you watch very many infomercials, you soon get the impression that all across the land people's biggest problem is wayward clothing. Lapels that won't stay down! Blazers that gap across the button line! And the hems of your jeans - won't someone please help me hem my jeans?

This video raises an interesting question, though. Is this a situation where you can spend money to save money? I suppose that in better economic times, people who wanted to wear a pair of jeans with three different kinds of shoes would just buy three different pairs of jeans. One for each kind of shoes.

But now, the infomercial presumes that you want to make do by adapting that one pair of jeans to multiple shoe heights. Is this true? Is that a thing? Would people really rather spend however long every morning getting these damned snaps in place just to wear the one pair of jeans with heels today, and sandals tomorrow?

Unlike other solutions (even the ad mentions tailors and iron-on solutions), Style Snaps are removable. Pro: this lets you set different heights on the same pair of jeans. Con: I assume you have to take them out every time you launder the jeans. And my guess is that they're going to be constantly falling out in the course of a day.

But here is the biggest mystery: don't people realize that you can totally tell when someone's hemmed their jeans by cuffing them inside-out? You'll always have a big pooch of fabric down there, and the hem line is a fold instead of a proper hem.

So that's the question I'm left with: who is the target audience for this product? It's people who are vain enough to care about the length of their jeans, but not so vain that they care about the fact that folded-in jeans cuffs look like crap and everyone can tell.

That's a mystery.

Another market for Style Snaps is parents who want to make their children's clothing purchases go farther. So they buy one super-long pair of jeans, and make the kids use Style Snaps to adapt the length as they grow. Thanks, mom and dad! Might as well start socking away extra cash for the inevitable therapist sessions now.

I don't doubt that Style Snaps are useful in the other applications they mention. Keeping the flaps of cargo pants pockets shut, and that sort of thing. Except that if you have wayward clothing, you know it's totally going to exert enough force to pop the Style Snaps off the clothing. By the middle of the afternoon, you'll have a gapping button line with pieces of plastic stuck to it. Or you'll be standing there in the office bathroom trying to fish a sticky piece of plastic out of your underpants, where it fell when you were in the meeting with the regional manager, and it was totally driving you crazy the whole time, but you had to act like it wasn't happening and pay attention.

You know what I want to see? I want to see this product combining forces with Pajama Jeans. It's Pajama Jeans that you can adapt to high heels, sandals, or sneakers! Now that's your market right there.