Often plain-colored, the new look ties are 4cm to 6cm wide, against the traditional 8cm.
"Young people are buying these ties now, and the designers are offering new colors, new fabrics, new collections, they're making ties un-stodgy," said Nauerz, a reference to Dolce and Gabbana, Armani, Dior, Calvin Klein and Paul Smith.
"You can tell the fashion houses are not going to drop the tie."
Historian Farid Chenoune, author of a book on men's fashion through the ages, sees renewed designer interest in the tie as part of the struggle between the ethics of suburban rap and hip-hop, and inner-city life.
"There's currently a reassertion of central city elegance, based on the jacket, shirt and tie," he said in an interview. "There's a kind of struggle going on, which even has a slight political undertone, between suburban fashion and inner-city fashion, even though there are links between the two."
"The return of the tie via young rock groups is part of inner-city fashion, inner-city youth."
Chenoun said the comeback of the tie followed the return of the jacket and shirt five or six years ago by the under-35s, breaking with the T-shirts favored by the previous generation.
Like today's loosely-knotted, unkempt and worn ties, shirts since 2000 are cool if worn unbuttoned, loose, or straying from under a sweater or out of a pair of trousers.
"It's a statement by a generation, and the tie is part of it," he said.
But in one of Paris' top luxury goods stores, the vagaries of mass market buying have gone unnoticed.
At Charvet, the temple of the tie with an eye-boggling 8,000 on sale and a bespoke service of collars, shirts and suits to match, manager Anne-Marie Colban said of the fall in tie sales: "We have heard of it, but have never seen it."
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