Bonsai and Superfat

Nicknames given to two unorthodox tie knots found in British schools.

“The British school tie has gone rogue,” Finlo Rohrer announced in a recent article for the BBC:

Instead of the neatly tied four-in-hand, or even a slightly plumptious Windsor, tens of thousands of teenagers, and even younger children, are sporting a cornucopia of weird knots.

Pass by a group of schoolchildren on a bus and you will see a variety ofsubverted ties.

The micro tie, or “bonsai,” is in proportion but often only three or four inches long. Rather more common among the nonconforming children is the “superfat,” a grotesquely large knot, fatter even than those on display at a footballer’s court appearance, above a short tie.

More traditional is a normally-tied tie but loosened considerably. Finally, and perhaps the rarest of the bunch, is a completely rogue tie, where the wide part of the tie is done extremely short, while the thinner part - the “tail” - is long.

According to Rohrer, many schools tired of wrangling with students over their creative knots have abandoned traditional ties in favor of clip-ons.