On the Enduring Art of the Necktie
There is a moment, if you are lucky enough to find yourself inside E. Marinella on the Via Riviera di Chiaia in Naples, when the sheer density of silk in one room becomes something close to spiritual. The shop is barely larger than a generous wardrobe. Ties hang in pleated cascades from floor to ceiling, thousands of them, in every conceivable weight and pattern, the light catching the warp and weft like a Turner seascape at low tide. The Neapolitan expression was coined as a declaration of perfection: once you have witnessed the most beautiful thing the world has to offer, there is nowhere left to go. Standing inside Marinella, surrounded by seven-fold silk, I find myself inclined to agree.
The necktie is, by the estimation of a great many serious people, dead. It has been dying for approximately forty years. Every generation of cultural commentators has written its obituary with the confident finality of someone who has never once tied a Kelvin knot. And yet here we are. The tie persists, quietly, stubbornly, magnificently, not because boardrooms demand it, but because a certain kind of man has discovered that it is one of the last remaining spaces in menswear where genuine connoisseurship still operates almost entirely below the surface. The initiated know. Everyone else sees a strip of fabric.
What the best writing on dress has always understood, the kind that treats a roll of the lapel or the behaviour of an interlining as subjects worthy of the same rigour one brings to literature or architecture, is that clothing, at the level where it becomes craft, is an argument about values. How something is made, and by whom, and with what degree of patience, is a moral as much as an aesthetic question. The tie rewards exactly this kind of attention. It is small enough to be overlooked entirely, and precise enough to repay scrutiny indefinitely. It is, in short, the perfect object.
The Makers
My affections in neckwear are neither broad nor apologetic. I have arrived, through years of acquisition and occasional expensive error, at three houses whose output I consider essential: Charvet, E. Marinella, and E.G. Cappelli. They represent not merely different addresses but different philosophies of what a tie can be, and what it should ask of the man wearing it.
Charvet
At 28 Place Vendôme, Charvet operates in a state of magnificent self-certainty that is entirely earned. The house, established in 1838, is the oldest shirt maker in Paris and arguably the finest purveyor of neckwear in the world — a claim that invites argument from Neapolitans and Romans, but one that is hard to dismiss once you have held a Charvet tie in your hands. The weight is immediately apparent. These are not ties constructed for the speed of modern tailoring; they are objects made with the kind of deliberate slowness that produces things worth keeping.
The silks are woven exclusively for the house, the patterns proprietary, the colour sense both radical and timeless in a manner that is almost impossible to explain and completely impossible to imitate. A Charvet madder sits on the chest with the settled authority of a statement that has already been agreed upon. You do not wear a Charvet tie to make an impression. You wear it because you have already made one. There is something deeply Parisian about this — the conviction that true elegance announces itself in a register inaudible to those not paying attention.
E. Marinella
Eugenio Marinella opened his shop in Naples in 1914, a few metres from the sea, and the house has never moved and barely changed. That is not nostalgia, it is philosophy. The Marinella tie is a southern Italian object in the same way that a Neapolitan suit is a southern Italian object: lighter than you expect, more alive in the hand, with a softness of construction that produces a knot of particular character, slightly asymmetrical, slightly full, utterly uncontrived. The seven-fold construction, in which the silk is folded seven times with no lining, is the house signature. It produces a tie of unusual drape and warmth that changes with every wearing, conforming gently to whoever is knotting it.
What I return to again and again from Marinella are the small-scale ancient madder prints, foulards whose pattern density rewards proximity in a way that larger designs cannot. From a distance, a solid burgundy or a deep navy. Up close, a labyrinth of small paisleys, diamonds, a geometry that took someone months to design and which will, in all likelihood, remain in production for another hundred years. Presidents have bought here. So, one imagines, have fishermen. The genius of Marinella is that the tie is entirely indifferent to the distinction.
E.G. Cappelli
If Charvet is the institution and Marinella the inheritance, then E.G. Cappelli is the obsession. Remo Cappelli’s operation, run from Naples with the intensity of a man who has decided that compromise is a form of dishonesty, is smaller and quieter than the two great houses and, for a certain kind of collector, considerably more dangerous. Cappelli produces ties in the manner of an artisan who treats every piece as an unsolved problem in colour and pattern, combinations of ground and repeat that should, by conventional logic, fail, and instead succeed with a conviction that makes you wonder why anyone ever played it safe.
The construction is impeccable throughout: soft, hand-rolled edges, silk of unusual character and depth, an interlining that gives just enough body to hold a knot without ever approaching stiffness. But it is the risk-taking in pattern that defines the house. Cappelli ties do not flatter indiscriminate taste. They are, in the best possible sense, difficult, objects that require something of you, that ask whether you are genuinely paying attention or merely dressed. They are the neckwear I recommend only to people whose taste I already trust.
What Remains
I own rather more ties than I have any reasonable occasion to wear, which is the natural condition of anyone who has taken the subject seriously. There are Charvets in the drawer whose patterns I have not revisited since the season I bought them; Marinella madders worn to the softness of a second skin; a Cappelli in a particular shade of burnt sienna over a small diamond repeat that I consider among the finer objects in my possession. I am not embarrassed by any of this. The tie, at its best, is a record of attention, evidence that someone, somewhere along the line, cared enough to design a pattern that repays looking, to weave a silk that rewards touch, to fold and stitch and finish something that did not need to be beautiful but is.
The broader conversation around considered dress has shifted considerably over the past decade, and the tie has benefited in ways its mourners did not anticipate. Liberated from obligation, it has become a choice, and a choice made with care is a different object entirely from one made from compulsion. The men who wear ties now, the ones who seek out seven-fold silk and hand-rolled edges and patterns woven to proprietary specifications on Jacquard looms outside Como, are not wearing them because they have to. They are wearing them because they have looked carefully enough at the world to know the difference between something made well and something merely made. That distinction, it turns out, is everything.
See Naples and die. It is a phrase about the impossibility of improvement — the idea that once you have encountered something at the height of its form, the rest of the world’s offerings become, at best, a footnote. I do not think the tie is dead. I think it has arrived at exactly this point: refined by its own irrelevance into something purer, kept now only by those who genuinely want it. In a world where the tie is no longer required, the tie has finally become, for the first time, entirely itself.
