In The Thick of It, BBC4’s political satire, the hapless opposition minister Peter Mannion is being dressed by his spin-doctor. “No tie, you say?” asks the minister, forlornly. “No tie,” affirms the spin-doctor, grim faced. The message is clear: ties are not cool and are an electoral liability.

In real life David Cameron has become the poster boy for the open-neck shirt look. Last month he even turned up without at tie at the Conservatives’ winter ball — once the bastion of Tory traditionalism. But it’s not just MPs who use their neckwear (or lack of it) to craft an image. Richard Branson has built a whole brand on not being buttoned up, and it would be as strange to see him with a tie as it would without a beard.

So far the abandonment of the tie has taken place without fanfare. All that is about to change with the launch of a fully fledged antitie movement — a war on collars, you might say. Today in London, and tomorrow in New York, the Mandarin Collar Society is announcing its formation. Its aim is nothing less than the worldwide elimination of the necktie and its replacement with the open collar.

The society — whose signed-up members include Linford Christie and the chef Pierre Gagnaire — has even issued a manifesto, which makes for rousing reading. Neckties, it declares, are “historical relics”. Not only do they “impose conformity, invite enslavement, and remind the wearer that his superiors have him by the neck”; they are also a health risk — those who wear their ties too tight are apparently more likely to develop glaucoma. Worst of all, says the group, neckties are pointless, and serve “no obvious function other than as a soup bib”.

“Loosen the noose! End the oppression!” concludes the manifesto. If women’s emancipation came to be defined by the demise of the corset, it is clear that — for the Mandarin Collar Society at least — the necktie has the same symbolic significance as a historical instrument of male oppression.

The Mandarin Collar Society (for information, email mcs@shanghaitang.com) is the brainchild of the flamboyantly named Raphael le Masne de Chermont, CEO of Shanghai Tang, the Hong Kong-based clothing company. “We want to launch a no-tie attitude,” he tells me just before boarding a plane in Marseilles, where he has been spreading his message. The campaign is not entirely selfless: Le Masne is hoping that, as people abandon the tie, they will purchase a mandarin collar shirt from his collection instead. (For those not in the know, a mandarin collar is a less severe version of the Chairman Mao look — and ties can form no part of the repertoire.)

Tie-less for the past five years, Le Masne insists that there are not just ideological reasons for shunning the necktie, but practical ones, too. Eating dim sum becomes a less hazardous enterprise, and “if I put on weight I don’t strangle myself with my collar”. However, the tie lobby is not taking this lying down. “That’s quite horrendous,” gasped Fiona Rushton of Hermãs — considered by the cognoscenti to be the apex of modern tie making — when I revealed the existence of the Mandarin Collar Society. “I can’t believe they’ve issued an antitie manifesto.” Far from being outmoded, she insisted, these days the tie is as much a fashion accessory as a requirement for work, and that sales are on the up — even in China, where Hermãs has six stores. As a sign of how the tie war has escalated, Hermãs has launched a counterblast: “for the right of the tie to arrange its own affairs”.

But what is the tie for? “Neckwear has long been a way of finishing an outfit, displaying wealth, and drawing attention to the face and framing the head,” says Sonnet Stanfill, the Curator of Contemporary Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who refuses to take sides in the tie spat. “It allows colour into an outfit, and allows an expression of one’s personality. The contemporary interpretation of ties continues that tradition.”

Although early incarnations of the tie can be traced back as far as the 16th century, its modern form did not emerge until Victorian times and was at first confined to sporting clubs. The earliest tie in the V&A’s collection dates from the 1870s, and belonged to the I Zingari Cricket Club: in addition to flying the club colours from a flag, members draped them round their necks too.

Ties remain a stable of clubs and societies, and it’s partly these connotations that lend the tie its fusty image — while the “old school tie” is synonymous with a deeply unfashionable elitism. Then there are novelty ties, which often seem to be a substitute for, rather than an expression of, personality.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, it’s all proof that everyday sartorial decisions are more loaded with meaning than we realise. In any case, the whole dispute may soon be redundant. Le Masne tells me that in Hong Kong recently the Chief Executive ordered that the air conditioning be turned down in parliament, to save both energy costs and the environment. In a quid pro quo for the warmer temperatures, MPs were allowed to stop wearing ties.

Like polar bears and the county of Norfolk, the humble tie might soon be one more casualty of climate change.

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