FRIDAY, March 9, is a big night in the calendar for staff here at the Daily Echo. It's one night where we get all dressed up, have a couple of glasses of wine and break bread in appreciation of each other's work over the past year. It also represents a huge dilemma for a lot of people: what to wear.

From the moment the date of the event is announced, which is usually months in advance, it's fairly common to hear a number of female members of staff discussing the finer points of their apparel.

Now before you think I'm going to go into a rant about women being unable to choose an outfit without talking to at least 15 colleagues to make sure that they don't clash, or that they can't possibly entertain wearing the same outfit as last year because somebody may remember and think they've only got one decent dress, I'm not. I'm not even going to mention coordinating clutch bags with shoes, which is apparently very important, or the merits of hair up versus hair down.

No. I want to point out that us chaps face a wardrobe challenge of our own.

Standard practice was and is black tie, the classic outfit that gets every bloke thinking they look like James Bond even when we probably resemble a par-ticularly rubbish bouncer.

But now this outfit, the epitome of male sartorial elegance, has been given a new slant. If you have seen any celebrity award ceremonies recently, including the Oscars a couple of weeks ago, you will have noticed that the black tie is no longer of the bowed variety, but replaced with a smart, skinny variation. Talk about throwing a spanner in the works!

Personally I will be fully embracing this change, if only to save myself from the frustration of trying to tie a bow tie correctly, or wearing an awful clip-on affair that I know won't stay in place and will result in me adjusting it every five minutes.

A normal tie is something that - after wearing one virtually every day for the last 20 years - I think I have finally mastered. The only question now is what type of knot do you do?

All these decisions. Ladies don't know how easy they have it sometimes.