The dying tie industry

Gallup reports only 6 percent of American men wear ties to work, down from 10 percent in 2002.

WASHINGTON -- There's alarming news on the cultural front. After 60 years, the Men's Dress Furnishing Association, its membership down from 120 to 25, is disbanding. The association is the trade group of American necktie makers.

This could leave us naked to the looming menace of foreign neckwear, but that doesn't seem to matter much anymore because a key reason for the group's demise is that men no longer seem to be wearing neckties.

All of this was front-page news in The Wall Street Journal, whose readers constitute perhaps the last great bastion of tie-wearers in the United States. But, according to a Gallup poll cited in the story, only 6 percent of American males wear ties to work, down from 10 percent in 2002.

That seems low to me but maybe not. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough doesn't wear a tie nor do any of the other males on the show except conservative voice Pat Buchanan, very much a traditionalist and maybe the exception that proves the rule. When a conservative Republican ex-congressman eschews a tie it means this trend has struck deep into the body politic.

Walking along Capitol Street you will see many professional men not wear ties. Some wear suits without ties. I don't wear a tie because in the computer field it can be a safety hazard.

Yet the Gallup Poll results seem high to me. Is the tie dead? Do you wear a tie? If not why not?