Anyone tried there stuff out?

The above leads onto the question of who wears Regimental/Old School/College ties.

And as usual in England the 'rules' are strange... And Paul Keers didn't quite know the 'inside' story...

Only if you are attending some appropriate function do you wear the tie you are entitled to.
Never should you wear it to work or around town - Very vulgar of you to feel the need to advertise yourself in that way.

Yet any tie may be worn as 'fashion'. Again, it is the wearer's intention that counts.

How anybody seeing you in a tie can know your intentions is beyond me though...

Nobody ever challenges anybody about a tie who has any business doing so - FACT.

If I wear a Guards tie cos I like it, no member of the Guards would ever be so gauche as to come up to me and ask me about it, provided I looked the part. Any other wearer of the Red & Blue would assume I was either entitled or was just 'wearing it as a tie'. In neither case would it be of interest to him to find out which. He would look like a fool doing so and he would never know what cheek he might get back in return.

BUT little-minded people who think they know about clothes might challenge you. Your response is just to look oddly at them and ask them if they are interested in ties. If you do this properly they will blush and go all quiet & embarrassed for being so gauche and forward as to talk to one such as yourself. You need to have that horrible drop-dead tone of English voice to do this well.

I've stopped wearing Repps now. I like them, but they are such hard work.

Miles.

PS Only ever got challenged on a tie once & it was a Guards tie & the challenger was a security guard near my old office. I can't say I found the experience significant.

I think a Guards tie is so classic that it is way beyond its Regimental past now.
Funny how it's only people NOT entitled to wear these ties that are bothered by non-Guardsmen wearing them...
And such a versitile tie too - Goes with so many things.
As I say, a classic.

Here is the Tom Wolfe quote I mentioned above:

From The Mid-Atlantic Man, an essay in The Pump House Gang. 1969 although syndicated in 1968.

"Wearing a Cambridge scarf in here was far, far worse than having no insignia at all. In a complex Cambridge hierarchy of colleges and clubs - if all one had was an insignia that said merely that one had been admitted to the university - that was as much as saying, well, he's here and that's all one can say about him, other than that he is a hopeless fool."

Cruel, but true of most insignia bearing communities I think.