Bands are a form of formal neckwear, worn by some clergy and lawyers, and with some forms of academic dress. They take the form of two oblong pieces of cloth, usually though not invariably white, which are tied to the neck. When worn by clergy, they typically are attached to a clerical collar. The word bands is usually plural because they require two similar parts and did not come as one piece of cloth. Those worn by clergy are often called preaching bands or Geneva bands; those worn by lawyers are called barrister's bands or, more usually in Ireland and Canada, tabs.

Ruffs were popular in the sixteenth century, and remained so until the late 1640s, alongside the more fashionable standing and falling bands. Ruffs, like bands, were sewn to a fairly deep neck-band. They could be either standing or falling ruffs. Standing ruffs were common with legal, and official dress till comparatively late. Falling ruffs were popular c. 1615 – c. 1640s.

In the early sixteenth century bands referred to the shirt neck-band under a ruff. For the rest of the century, when ruffs were still worn, and in the seventeenth century, bands referred to all the variations of this neckwear. All bands or collars arose from a standing neck-band of varying heights. They were tied at the throat with band-strings ending in tiny tassels or crochet-covered balls.

Bands were adopted in England for legal, official, ecclesiastical, and academical use in the mid-seventeenth century. They varied from those worn by priests (very long, of cambric or linen, and reaching over the chest), to the much shorter ecclesiastical bands of black gauze with white hem showing on the outside. Both were developments of the seventeenth century lay collar.

Bands varied from small white turn-down collars and ruffs to point lace bands, depending upon fashion, until the mid-seventeenth century, when plain white bands came to be the invariable neck-wear of all judges, serjeants, barristers, students, clergy, and academics.

The bands are two strips of bleached holland or similar material, falling down the front from the collar. Plain linen 'falling bands', developed from the falling collar, replaced the ruff about 1640. By 1650 they were universal. Originally in the form of a wide collar, tied with a lace in front, by the 1680s they had diminished to the traditional form of two rectangles of linen tied at the throat.

Bands did not become academically significant until they were abandoned as an ordinary lay fashion after the Restoration in 1660. They became identified as specifically applicable to clerical, legal and academic individuals in the early eighteenth century, when they became longer and narrower in form.

For a time from the eighteenth century judges and King's Counsel took to wearing lace jabots at courts and leveés. Bands are now worn as court dress by judges, King's Counsel, barristers, solicitor advocates, court officials, and as ceremonial/formal dress by certain public officials, university officials and less frequently also by graduands (for example, they are compulsory for male Cambridge graduands, worn with a white bow tie, and optional for women). These specifically form part of the full dress of circuit judges, Court of Appeal judges and the Lord Chief Justice. Mourning bands, which have a double pleat running down the middle of each wing or tongue, are still used by some barristers, clergy and officials.