Pleasant Pheasant Brocade

Now here's an interesting tie. Also a relatively recent eBay acquisition. On the surface, what you see is a kind of shimmering stripes of orangey brown and tan, fading into one another, and angled from left to right at about a 45 degree angle.

Right about midway up the tie (it looks higher on the scan, due to the limited range of the scanner, which can only handle 8 1/2 by 11 inch images), is a patterned stripe containing a vaguely floral pattern that could almost be Christmas inspired, with leaves of red and green formed into large draped garlands.

But by far more interesting than any of these details is the pattern woven into the brocade, which consists of what appear to me like stylized pheasants, or fancy long-tailed birds of some type. I suppose a more fanciful view might be that they are representations of the fabled Phoenix bird.

I suspected they would be difficult to see in the scan of the tie itself, so I selected one bird out, and saved it as a separate file, enhanced the color and contrast a bit to make it hopefully easier to see, and frankly, to make it slightly closer to the original, at least in my eyes. Of course, I realize that this is very subjective, since I have no way of calibrating my computer monitor accurately, so I don't know if the colors I'm seeing are even close to what you, gentle reader, may see on YOUR screen.

But hopefully the bird, at least, is more clearly visible in this closeup view. So that you can make up your own mind what kind of fowl it represents. These birds literally cover the entire surface of the tie, since they are woven directly into the fabric of it, even under the stripe of darker brown, red and green swags.

The tie has but one label, which is printed directly onto the fabric just a couple or three inches from the bottom of the large end, on the back side. If I hadn't already loaded two separate images, I would have been tempted to scan the label and show it too, but I didn't want to take the time, having some chores yet to do today. The label reads as follows:

Van Heusen
Original

So there you have it!