Often maligned by fashionheads but never completely exorcized from the wardrobe of surly young boys forced to attend weddings, bar mitzvahs and funerals, the clip-on tie was created in Clinton, Iowa amid the rip-roaring excess of 1928. Presumably, chaps were so busy attending various Gatsby-adjacent parties that it became necessary to save tie-tying time — which is where Joseph Less, an orchestra leader for MGM and Loews theaters, came in.
The original iteration of the clip-on tie was the One-In-Hand Tie, a tie with a pre-made knot and a slot in the back to insert the narrow end. This reduced the multiple steps of tying a four-in-hand knot (the traditional narrow one-loop tie) to a single operation.
He discovered the knot “quite by accident,” according to a 1972 Des Moines Register retrospective. “He tried crossing the neckband of his tie one morning. He pulled the tie up to his collar and found it would not loosen. This was the knot that launched an industry.”
He shared his perma-knot with other musicians and actors in his social circle. When a member of his band put a joke ad in the paper with the headline “Crazy Inventor Invents Not-So-Crazy Necktie,” Less found himself so flooded with calls that he and his brother started to manufacture the readymades on an industrial scale.
Later, Less developed the clip-on tie, skipping the neck-wrapping step altogether. In his patent, he said that the neckband of the tie was “useless and uncomfortable in warm weather”; that hasn’t stopped the ties becoming a staple of police uniforms and child formal wear — both cases in which a traditional tie can pose a strangulation hazard.
“The Less brothers just smile at the contention of competitors that they can’t sell fashionable neckwear from the country’s leading corn-and-hog state,” the Register reporter wrote in ’74, before waxing poetic: “Their sleek knots can be found under starched or ruffled collars in far-flung places. Clinton is their home town, Iowa their home state; here they are, and will be, a success.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
