The necktie, knot what it used to be, still hangs on

They were the best of ties.They were the worst of ties.

Skinny little beatnik ties and mod doublewide ties. Suave and sophisticated Frank Sinatra ties and greedy Gordon Gekko power ties. Bar Mitzvah boy clip-on ties and Jerry Garcia trippin’ ties.

And, of course, all those closet doors decked with millions of gifted ties.

But now, with another Father’s Day upon us, comes word that the necktie _ that elongated swatch of silk or polyester or rayon whose donning has long marked a male rite of passage while serving no discernible utility _ may be fading into the fashion sunset.

The recent decision by the Men’s Dress Furnishings Association _ the trade group for America’s neckwear makers _ to shut down has some folks tied up in knots. A calendar crammed with casual Fridays (and Mondays and Thursdays ...) has exacted its last, grim toll, some said.

In an age where some people show up for job interviews in flip-flops, the imminent death of the tie seems plausible.

It’s been a good, long time, after all, since America was a nation of necktie-wearers.

Look back at pictures from the Great Depression and you’ll see men who put on ties before taking their place on soup lines. The stands at baseball games were once filled with men in ties _ even on weekends. In the years after World War II, when employers created thousands of new office jobs, the sidewalks of downtowns across the country were thronged by men whose necks were cloaked in soldierly stripes and solids.

But before we deliver the eulogy for the necktie, consider this:

Men have been wrapping and winding pieces of cloth around their necks for hundreds of years. It’s clear that the tie, once the very symbol of the male establishment, is far from the icon it used to be.

Still, there’s small comfort for neckwear makers: At least they’re not selling fedoras.

And, given the fickleness of fashion and the fact that some occasions still demand a tie, it’s probably too soon to write its epitaph.

"You almost want to say, ’poor necktie,’ so abused and underappreciated," says Candace Corlett, president of the consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail.

Predictions of the necktie’s demise have been circulating for years. In the mid-1990s, designer Gianni Versace offered his vision of male fashion in a coffee-table book titled "Men Without Ties," a sure sign of where things were headed. A bronzed Adonis dashed across its cover dressed in nothing but a few ties, lashed loosely around his waist.

The burgeoning popularity of casual Fridays turned khakis and open collar-shirts into suitable wear for workplaces previously better suited to suits. The dot-com boom filled thousands of instant offices with laid-back twentysomethings who saw no point in lashing something tight around their necks.

But rumors of the tie’s death are roughly equivalent to the longtime predictions that the computer would soon turn society paperless. There’s a lot of truth to the prognostication, but somehow it hasn’t quite turned out that way.

Clearly, the tie business is nothing like the old days. In the early 1970s, when sales peaked, manufacturers sold between 200 million and 250 million ties a year in the U.S. Today annual sales have dropped to about 50 million, according to Lee Terrill, president of the neckwear division of Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., the nation’s largest tie maker.