What Poets, Presidents and Groucho Shared : Bow ties: Only a few men can master these sartorial butterflies.

Consider the bow tie. It’s a piece of sartorial impertinence, a perky colored, narrow length of cloth secured around the neck in a knot that seems to baffle the most ingenious of men. An insouciant touch to the drab dress of the male.

The first time I wore a bow tie, I was a sophomore trying to impress a haughty minx in my high school English class. Over the years, I’ve worn them in many colors, shapes and sizes. I wore a dazzler at my recent 90th birthday party.

Bow ties are standard equipment among men for whom the conventional dangling necktie would create occupational hazards, such as machinists, garage attendants and waiters. The Army frowns on them but the Navy, a stickler for tradition, makes some concession to the mode with the loosely tied bows for sailors’ middy blouses.

In the bow-tie lore, one oddity is outstanding: the ubiquity of polka-dots. If a gent possesses bow ties by the score, you may be sure he has several of the polka-dot variety. And if a man owns only one, chances are it is polka-dotted.

What is the appeal of a bow tie? It’s the butterfly of man’s clothes, a thing of winged beauty that looks down in haughty contrast to the practicality of coat, vest, shirt and trousers. And it has an immediate anti-geriatric effect. A man with a bow tie must perforce hold his head up. The result is better posture, and, cunningly, his second chin, that jowly herald of oncoming age, is gone. It is a sign of youthfulness in body, mind and spirit.

A world-class bow-tie man was Lloyd M. Braff, who was Los Angeles city traffic manager in the 1950s. He never wore any other kind. He wore them of every color, material, design and shape. He even had one with red, amber and green sequins in the shape of traffic signals.

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill is one of the world’s distinguished men who prefer the bow tie. He gave the bow tie worldwide status in his portrait by Karsh, in a pose that seems to typify all the best characteristics of the man himself and of the people he led in war and peace. Other bow-tie aficionados include Presidents Warren Gamaliel Harding and Harry Truman, H.L. Mencken and Groucho Marx.

Abe Lincoln wore a bow tie, of another genre, but a bow tie nevertheless. Who can imagine Abe’s beard covering a Windsor knot? Bow ties were the standard adornment of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. They were also the hallmark of sculptors, painters, writers and other practitioners of the gentle arts and the sturdy crafts, ancient and modern.

Still, the average man doesn’t wear a bow tie. The reason is simple--he doesn’t know how to knot it. You may be sure he has tried, to no avail. In disgust, he returns to the old hanging necktie.

And so, how to knot a bow tie: Hold an end in each hand. Imagine you are holding your shoe laces. Now tie the “shoe laces.” Simple, wasn’t it? Welcome to the clan.