For the anonymous author of Neckclothitania, a deadly serious manual on correct necktie etiquette for the early 19th-century gentleman, the stakes could not be overstated. Your tie drew a “clear and distinct line between l’homme comme il faut (the proper gentleman) and la canille (the cad)”. Similarly, for the Baron de Empese, author of L’Art de se mettre la cravate, in 1827, the wrong tie risked no less than “shafts of ridicule, which (with no unsparing hand) will be showered upon you on all sides”.

Fast forward 170 years and, if heated discussions on The TES website are to be believed, the situation is scarcely less perilous for the modern British teacher. Some claim discrimination by colleagues because of an open collar, while others insist that going without a rag around your neck is tantamount to surrendering discipline in the classroom. One correspondent even reports a rather scary sounding staffroom in which male staff synchronised their shirt and tie combinations! Certainly, pupils have fought a long guerrilla war against the formal noose: loosening it, shortening it, tightening it, tucking it away in their shirts, anything but wear something that might be recognisable as a necktie. But how should today’s teacher approach this peculiar sartorial decoration?

Why do men wear such affectations around their necks in the first place? The American journalist Linda Ellerbee once asked: “If men run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties. How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a noose around your neck?” It is perhaps a reflection on men’s intelligence that they have been doing this without the least sign of worry for at least two millennia. The terracotta warriors buried in the tomb of China’s first emperor Qin Shih-huang-di in 221BC wore ties. Roman soldiers on the Column of Trajan in Rome also tie cloth round their necks. In Japan, the gaudy designs of the tenugui have been enlivening working men and women’s dress since the Middle Ages, although knotting the cloth is seen as the sign of the country hick.

But it was not until a bunch of dashing Croatian mercenaries in the army of King Louis XIII started knotting decorative cloths around their necks and inspired a craze among their French comrades in arms that the modern western tradition of the necktie got underway.

The new style was dubbed the cravat, a corruption of Croat according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and quickly spread to the 17th-century French court where a young Charles II, still waiting to reclaim the English throne from the Cromwellians, adopted the style. Within a decade of the Restoration, it had become popular across England and its American colonies.

A heady succession of neck fashions followed, featuring such forgotten delights as the Steenkirk, the Stock, and the Solitaire. Such fashions reached absurdity in the early 18th century, with enormous rippling white bows that barely allowed their wearers to turn their heads. It was not until the fastidious “Beau” Brummell befriended the Prince of Wales, later George IV, and began to exercise a hypnotic control over early 19th-century fashion that things returned to some kind of sense. He demanded a renunciation of extravagance and a pure white cravat, simply tied.

“Take great care always to be dressed like the reasonable people of your own age, in the place where you are; whose dress is never spoken of one way or another as either too negligent or too much studied,” he advised the Earl of Chesterfield.

In the Victorian era, the cravat was superseded by ties that closely resembled the modern “four-in hand” tie (probably named after a Victorian club that adopted the style), and the neck tie gradually secured its place as the compulsory focal point of modern white-collar workers’ formal dress. Fashion experts are divided over whether these strange, apparently functionless bits of fabric have been a liberating opportunity for men to put some colour into their dress, or whether they have steadily drained individuality from the clothing that frames them. But the fact remains that more men blithely tie a noose around their necks every morning than ever before - about 600 million, at the last estimate.

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CARTOON CHARACTER

Paul Sunderland

Maths teacher

“I like to make people smile. They like different ones. The boys in my class like the cartoon character ties - like this one with Homer Simpson. The girls like Winnie the Pooh. My favourite tie of all time was a Star Wars tie. They are just a bit of fun and I don’t take them too seriously.”

THE DANDY

Nick Fraser

English teacher

“I’ve probably got 200 ties. I like to look good, and I spend quite a lot of time and money on it. I get the piss ripped out of me but I don’t really care. I don’t go for these novelty ties - things that say: “Look at me, I’m wacky.” I like wearing clothes, and I like wearing stylish clothes. I bought this cravat to go with a dress my girlfriend bought. A lot of people see what they wear during the day as just work clothes, but you spend so much of your life in them that you might as well enjoy them.”

BORN AGAIN

Alan Stevens

Associate principal

“About a year ago, my son told me my white shirts were boring. I suddenly realised he was right. I cleared them all out. Then I discovered I had to clear out half my ties because they didn’t go with a coloured shirt. With a white shirt you can wear anything, but with a coloured one it is all about co-ordination. You have to think carefully about what goes with what. I have different ties for different shirts. Today, we are using video conferencing so this is my video-friendly outfit - all purple.”

THE POET

Rob Coffey

Key stage 4 English co-ordinator

“It’s national poetry day today and so I’m wearing this - it’s of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I have another one with books on it and one with Chaucer’s characters on it. It’s just a bit of fun, but I do sometimes find students reading the tie rather than listening to what I am saying. You have to draw the line sometimes.”

THE DRINKER

Nigel Smith

Deputy principal

People think my tie is a statement about my partiality to alcohol. But it’s a matter of style. I’d bought a yellow shirt but had no tie for it. Then I found this one. I have a Thai tie, an Einstein tie and a Wallace and Grommit tie. The truth is, though, that I wear ties because it’s part of the job. Out of school, I never wear them.

THE DUTIFUL HUSBAND

Danny Cameron

ICT teacher

“Nine times out of ten, it’s whatever tie my hand grabs in the morning but my wife sometimes sends me back to change it. Given a choice, I’d prefer not to wear one. It’s about fulfilling people’s expectations. You don’t want to be seen as scruffy. But there is room for self-expression. This tie has got hippopotamuses on it. People might not see that, but I know it has them. I have a Mickey Mouse one too!”.

THE BANK MANAGER

Nick Olly

Deputy principal

“You expect your bank manager to wear one and it’s the same with us, especially senior management. People expect us to dress smartly and it is like we tell the children: ‘You have to present yourself in a certain way to be taken seriously.’ It’s the bank-manager factor. You don’t just blindly follow something everybody else does, though. This may look like just a smart yellow tie to you but it is actually a Norwich City tie. For me, it shows my allegiance to them - it tells the pupils I am proud not just of following the crowd behind Manchester United.