By this point, we all know what it looks like when Donald Trump wears a tie. That tie—it’s going to be big. It’s probably going to be red. And it’s definitely going to be fastened with the hamfisted inverted triangle of a full Windsor knot.
On Monday, as Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, he and his VP, JD Vance, both opted for reddish, Windsor-knotted neckties, making for some low-hanging symbolism of their fiery Republican sensibilities. The Windsor knot, like many of Trump’s aesthetic proclivities, is a relic of bygone aristocrats (its namesake is the abdicatin’ Duke of Windsor) and its beefy, symmetrical shape has long been considered passé by menswear aficionados. According to author Ian Fleming’s fifth James Bond novel—titled, funnily enough, From Russia With Love—the fictional international superspy/real-life fashion icon was never a fan.
“Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot,” Fleming wrote. “It showed too much vanity. It was often the mark of a cad.”
Cads in Windsor knots abounded at Monday’s ceremony. Seated together in a murders’ row of folding chairs, Silicon Valley’s tech elite—Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—had prime-view seats to the inaugural happenings in the Capitol Rotunda. Like Trump and Vance, Zuckerberg and Bezos both wore unexceptional navy suits and wide burgundy-toned neckties knotted with chunky, triangular Windsors. (The two CEOs were also accompanied by their partners, and in another curious instance of sartorial symmetry, Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez both wore optic-white jacketed ensembles.)
Pichai, who sported a purplish printed tie, also opted for the Windsor. Musk, who always manages to stray from the pack for one reason or another, went for a four-in-hand—nominally GQ’s knot of choice, though Musk’s appeared rather sloppily tied, and he fussed with his solid navy necktie throughout the event.