The legend of the "neck knot"...all about the TIE !

Around the world about 600 million men regularly wear it.

In Germany, every man has an average of 20 ties.  

The big question for many men is: 'Who came up with an idea like that?'
Steenkerke, a town in Belgium, claims the honor of having "invented" the tie. In 1692 the British launched a surprise attack against the French troops stationed there. According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, "French officials did not have time to dress well. But they hastened to tie their uniforms scarf around their neck with a slow link, and slipped the ends of the scarf in the slots of the jacket. Voilà, the tie was born in its original form. "
However, the new military fashion was not exactly unprecedented. Experts point out some centuries before the warriors of the Chinese Emperor Cheng (Shih Huang Ti) wore around their neck like a scarf folded, indicating their rank.
But perhaps the most famous scarves were those belonged to Croats who fought for Louis XIV, king of France. During a parade held in Paris on the occasion of a victory, the French were so admired by Croats scarves that they started to call them Cravates, "hrvat" from Croatian, and they began to bring them too. "From then on," writes the aforementioned newspaper, "the fame of the ties continued to spread, although the soldiers of Steenkerke were the first to transform a scarf into a knotted tie."
During the French Revolution (1789-99) the political affiliation was indicated by the color of the tie or scarf around the neck. In nineteenth-century the Aristocratic European society  "discovered" this garment. It was then that the tie was not associated to the political and military world anymore and stepped into the male wardrobe. Today the tie is not only accepted around the world, but in some occasions it is even compulsory.