Bar None

For men’s dressing, as for most things of consequence, I believe the devil is really in the details. These details are everything from the weave of a cloth to the pattern of socks or a pocket square to jewelry and accessories. It’s this last category I want to discuss for a moment, and a particularly undervalued accessory in particular – the collar bar.

Usually this pin gets relegated to Merchant Ivory films, fancy dress parties, and fancy dress parties in Merchant Ivory films, but as long as you wear one with balance and conviction it really is quite easy to keep this trinket looking tried and true rather than phony. I love club collars, but steer clear. I love a perfectly crisp white pocket square, but keep things light and flowy. I love repp stripe ties, but tread (or rather Trad) carefully, lest you look like a lost extra from the 1936 Princeton yearbook. The key with such a markedly dated thing like this is to re-invent it in your own way and to incorporate it into your personal style rather than trying to rock it like it was originally done.

Without preaching too much at the altar of Ford, I do think Mr. Ford does the collar bar in a thoroughly modern way in the above advert. He keeps things crisp and monochrome, extremely modern, even though he is wearing a knit tie, flannel suit, and collar bar. It’s this incorporation and adaptation of classic elements into a new, modern idiom that I find so intriguing and amusing about little accessory ephemera like this.

A personal favorite choice for me to wear it with a button-down collar, and rather than buttoning the collar buttons, hold the collar tight with a bar instead. Completely superfluous, and even redundant, but a great shot of go-to-hell. And for those of us who don’t want to have a second set of shirts with collars specifically made for pins, J. Press, an Ivy mainstay, offers this model, which is my bar of choice. Looks like the classic safety pin design, sans ruined shirt collars. If you prefer the original though, it doesn’t get much better than this, even though the model is breaking two of my three above rules. I guess you can’t have it all, can you?