A serious danger in wearing a bow tie is to come off as a fuddy-duddy or even a sartorial prig. If that’s not the impression you’re going for, the trick is to choose a bow tie with an interesting texture. As Izzy previously noted, raw silk works wonderfully, but so too does velvet, like this gunmetal number from Band of Outsiders. Its small size, seen in action here, also helps makes it anything but stodgy. Other excellent textilian (Izzy’s coinage) choices include pinwale corduroy and wool.