Last summer, I had a job capturing a wedding. As anticipated, a portion of my duties included photographing the wedding parties as they got ready for the ceremony roughly an hour beforehand. Being the male photographer on the team, I naturally covered the guys.

There was a large wedding party of twelve, the groom included. These gentlemen were all getting their tuxes, boutonnieres, and such ready. Around half of them were doing quite well until it came to the tie.

The tie. They couldn’t manage to tie it. Keep in mind, we are talking about men in their mid to late twenties, yet they couldn’t handle tying a tie. These were simply Standard or Straight Line ties, not bowties, nor the elaborate types that someone like JP Morgan might have donned a century ago. Just a simple, everyday tie.

So I put the camera down and began tying ties for them. A half-windsor production line. It was kind of funny, but in retrospect, it was just sort of a commentary on the state of young men in the culture today. Many of the traditional skills that we learned from our fathers or elders have been lost. This sort of hit me again when the buzz of electric razors filled the room. Wet shave? What are you talking about? Anybody got a USB block I can use?

Now I remember my dad shining his wingtip shoes every Sunday before Mass when I was a kid. Kiwi polish and brush. This was a guy who got handed a pair of suede combat boots in the Marines and was ordered to turn them into a mirror. I never really learned that skill because in the 70s we had ‘earth shoes’ and nobody polished those.