Sunday, August 17, 2008

Green and Orange Nylon

The pattern on this tie is strange enough, but the fabric is what's really strange! Luckily there is a label which illuminates the fabric, somewhat. The label, interestingly, is sewn into large end of the tie, about nine inches up from the end of the tie. It reads as follows:

Guaranteed for LIFE
NYLON Ties
by Sherman

And yes, indeedy, this tie is most definitely made from nylon fabric. It is heavy duty, course, slippery, ribbed nylon, almost like something you'd expect to find tent fabric, or a wind breaker jacket, or something like that made out of, not a tie.

If you want a fabric to compare it with, the closest of any tie I've posted recently is the one depicting vintage gramophones, which I posted back in April of this year, and which was a special acetate fabric woven by the Rhodia company. But even that tie's fabric had a silky smooth feeling, compared with this.

Nevertheless, the tie ties neatly enough, and it certainly hangs flat. It would be difficult to change the crease, I think. But enough about the fabric.

What is this pattern trying to depict? A clue may come from the orange small-end piece depicted on the right side of the scan. The entire tie switches to this color and pattern about another four inches above the portion contained in the scan of the main piece. This would have caused the tie's not to be entirely in this complementary orange color, originally.

The pattern of green lines on the orange here looks to me like it might be depicting small wavelets of water. And those bizarrely shaped patterns on the face of the tie itself, getting ever larger as they approach the bottom, could perhaps be large droplets of water, splashing down the tie. If more of them were orange, rather than turquoise in color, one might almost thing they were tongues of flame, similar to the ones artists sometimes depict falling on the apostles on the first Day of Pentecost.

Well, perhaps I have too active an imagination. You can decide what they are for yourself, I guess, and write a comment, if you have another view.

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