The hottest accessory in women’s fashion requires no cleverly engineered underwear, no skipped meals, and no waiting lists. Interested? See me in my office. Not that I have one—a trivial detail since that is not a requirement for nailing a tie.
Venturing beyond their natural habitats—boardrooms, trading floors, tradition-shackled clubs—they are attracting a different kind of power broker: movie stars, fashion taste-makers, and Gen Z cool kids.
Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello spearheaded its women’s-wear return. At his spring 2025 show in Paris, last September, he proposed mannish double-breasted blazers, thick-frame glasses, and 24 outfits worn with ties. The fashion set loved it, and Hailey Bieber, Zoe Saldaña, and Elle Fanning have already bought into Vaccarello’s sultry, all-in take on power dressing by wearing his looks to premieres and parties.
By the time Saint Laurent’s advertising campaign came out, last month, photographed by David Sims and starring Michelle Pfeiffer as an absolute boss in a New York skyscraper, it was official: the tie is back.
Elsewhere, we’ve seen Demi Moore, Eiza González, and Kerry Washington trying out styles from longtime tie advocate Thom Browne. At Wimbledon last summer, Zendaya served up two Ralph Lauren tie-plus-blazer moments at Centre Court. The louche Loewe suiting with a gold-dipped feather tie that Ayo Edebiri wore to the Golden Globes has been one of the most discussed getups of the awards season. Styled by Danielle Goldberg, it was an homage to Julia Roberts, who wore Armani men’s wear to the 1990 ceremony.
Indeed, women wearing ties is not new. The roll call of stylish women who have who have worn them is mood-board gold: Princess Diana, Patti Smith, Brigitte Bardot, and Marlene Dietrich. The paradigm of the genre is Diane Keaton in her Annie Hall era, with a Ralph Lauren tie peeping out of her waistcoat.
So why is it back now? In our Trumpian age of misogyny, it feels like an attempt to wrest back control. A deliberate, forceful kickback against the male gaze. Hey dude, up here! To be buttoned up is the opposite of being, say, Mrs. Kanye West.
The tie also represents a rejection of the cartoonish, MAGA version of inflated, nipped-and-tucked, one-dimensional femininity. For many, the tie is a welcome antidote to the tradwife aesthetic and movement. Does that boss lady really look like she’s got time to make you dinner, honey?
One such boss lady is Jordan Grant, the co-founder of the members-only luxury-shopping app Mile, whose fondness for high-octane fashion is shared with more than 120,000 Instagram followers. She owns a Bottega Veneta emu-embossed leather tie and salutes its ease: “It immediately pulls you together. No matter how disheveled you feel or creased your shirt is, a tie can hide those sins.”
Styling one should be as gimmick-free as possible. Lean into a classic take: shirt buttoned up, preferably with tailoring. (Without a shirt, the effect can read cabaret; over a T-shirt, it could be mistaken for an homage to Avril Lavigne, circa 2002.) And shirts must be long-sleeved, rather than short-, unless you’re into the Dwight Schrute look.
Ease yourself in by matching your tie to your shirt, a styling hack seen at the Emporio Armani, Jil Sander, Willy Chavarria, and Ralph Lauren collections. Lauren made an especially compelling case for tonal plaid-on-plaid-on-plaid, which he showed in September on a runway in Bridgehampton.
When paired with a slouchy suit in understated colors, the tie is especially effective. It plays into the “corp core” or “office siren” trends that are taking off on TikTok—the adoption, re-interpretation, and fetishization of banal pieces typically associated with the nine-to-five set, which feel curiously novel now. (Particularly for members of Gen Z, who may have not yet stepped foot in one.)
To wear a tie is also to make a final, resolute rejection of the sloppy, semi-dressed, elasticized waistbands of pandemic-era dressing. And, anyway, since certain masters of the universe have long ago co-opted athleisure as workwear—that’s right, Zuck—there is something subversive about a return to formality.
But this is a formality that comes with a frisson. The tie communicates an empowerment that feels charged and autonomous. “Don’t think of it as a masculine accessory, as it actually serves to make the overall look more seductive,” says Kay Barron, the author of How to Wear Everything and fashion director of Net-a-Porter. The retailer has bet big on 80s-inflected power tailoring for spring.
There’s something sexy about a woman in a suit, shirt, and tie. Take Nicole Kidman at the Critics Choice Awards in February, wearing an oversize beige ensemble and a silk tie from (oui) Saint Laurent. The fact that she’s currently starring in the film Baby Girl, which has given nightmares to human-resources managers everywhere, gave the look an extra-spicy tang. Father figure? Nope. She’s the daddy.
“Wearing them is so fabulous because we’re almost not meant to do it,” says the stylist Sarah Corbett-Winder, founder of the London-based tailoring brand Kipper. Or as Grant puts it, “You don’t mess with a woman in a tie. She’s dangerous.”
Laura Antonia Jordan is a London-based writer and a contributing editor at Elle U.K.
