The rule first, because everything follows from it
Buy self-tie. Always, without exception, including the first one, including the one you are buying in a hurry for a black tie event next Thursday.
A pre-tied bow tie is a small clip-on lie, and it is detectable across a room. It sits too flat, too level and too symmetrical, and the neck band shows a hardware join at the back. A hand-tied bow is slightly uneven, sits with a little lift, and has the two blades falling at marginally different angles. That imperfection is the entire point. It is the visible evidence that a person did this, on purpose, with their own hands, in front of a mirror.
The tiny asymmetry of a hand-tied bow is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the whole signature.
Learning takes an evening. Genuinely. If you can tie a shoelace you can tie a bow tie, and the only reason it feels impossible at first is that you are doing it upside down, in reverse, under your own chin. Do it in front of a mirror four or five times and your hands will take over.
How to judge one
Four things, before you look at the pattern
The interlining. This is the hidden layer that gives a bow its body, and it is where the money goes. Too stiff and the bow looks like cardboard and will not knot cleanly. Too soft and it collapses by nine o’clock. A good maker uses a wool or wool-blend interlining cut on the correct grain, and you can feel it immediately: the tie should have spring rather than stiffness.
The silk. English woven silk, Italian printed silk and Japanese Kyoto silk are the three traditions worth knowing. Printed silk gives you sharper, more detailed patterns. Woven silk, where the pattern is in the structure rather than on the surface, has more depth and ages better.
The shape. Butterfly is the classic and the safest. Batwing, or straight-end, is narrower and more modern. Diamond point, with pointed ends, is the most rakish and the hardest to tie well. Pick one shape and learn it before experimenting.
And the size, which almost nobody gets right. The finished bow should be roughly as wide as the widest part of your face, and never wider than the distance between your pupils and the outer edges of your face. A large man in a small bow looks anxious. A small man in a large bow looks like a children’s entertainer. Most makers offer two or three widths, and it is worth asking.
The ten
1. Charvet, Paris
28 Place Vendôme
The greatest neckwear house in the world, and it has been since 1838, when it became the first shirtmaker anywhere to sell ready-made shirts and accessories in a shop. Charvet’s bow ties are the standard everything else is measured against.
What makes the shop extraordinary is the colour. Charvet stocks silks in a range of shades that no other house attempts, arranged by tone across an entire floor, and the experience of choosing one there is genuinely unlike buying anything else. Expensive, unhurried, and worth doing once even if you buy nothing.
2. Le Noeud Papillon, Sydney
Australia
The specialist. Le Noeud Papillon makes almost nothing but self-tying bow ties, has done so obsessively for over a decade, and has built an international following without a flagship on any famous street.
The founder writes at length, publicly, about interlining, silk mills and construction in a way no other maker bothers with, which tells you where the attention goes. If you want the single best-made self-tie bow available by post, this is the answer, and it is not from Europe.
3. Turnbull & Asser, London
71-72 Jermyn Street
Founded in 1885, holder of a Royal Warrant, and the house that dressed Winston Churchill and, on screen, James Bond. The bow ties are English woven silk, cut generously, and made to the same standard as the shirts.
What Turnbull does better than anyone is the black tie bow: properly weighted barathea and grosgrain in a butterfly shape that holds its form through an entire evening. If you own one bow tie in your life it should probably be this one, in black.
4. Cinabre, Paris
France
The modern French answer, and the most artistically interesting house on this list. Cinabre makes everything by hand in France in small runs, with an approach to colour and pattern that is closer to an atelier than a tie brand.
Where Charvet is the institution, Cinabre is the argument that French neckwear did not stop developing in 1950. Their pieces are the ones people ask you about.
5. Lindman New York
New York City
The custom option, and the one to use when you know exactly what you want and cannot find it. Carl Rutberg came to it through Pratt, a doctorate at NYU and a background in fabric and manufacturing, the bow ties are hand made in Italy, and the minimums for custom work are unusually low.
This is why institutions keep going back, Harvard, Princeton, the Whitney among them. If you need a specific colour, or a repeating pattern that exists nowhere on a shelf, this is the address.
6. Seigo Neckwear, New York
Madison Avenue
The Madison Avenue shop whose silks are woven in Kyoto and finished in New York, and whose colour sense is unmistakable once you have seen a few. Seigo works in combinations that should not function and invariably do.
A small house that understands the last ten percent of an outfit is where the actual work happens. Presidents have been spotted in them, which is a fact the shop is admirably quiet about.
7. R. Hanauer, Fort Mill, South Carolina
The American workshop. Randy Hanauer started in 1985 with pocket squares designed to be displayed rather than used, on a single machine in a tailor shop, and expanded into bow ties from there. Imported silks, sewn in South Carolina, sold through more than 330 shops.
It is the best value on this list by a comfortable margin, and the construction is genuinely good rather than merely acceptable for the price.
8. Fine and Dandy, New York
445 West 49th Street, Hell’s Kitchen
The most enjoyable shop on this list, and the best place to start if you are new to it. Matt Fox and Enrique Crame III opened in 2008, made in the USA, with a range of bow ties, suspenders, cummerbunds and pocket squares priced so that trying a colour you are unsure about costs you almost nothing.
It is the anti-intimidation option, and it deserves the place. More men have been talked into a first bow tie here than anywhere else in America.
9. Beau Ties Ltd of Vermont
Middlebury, Vermont
Handmade in Vermont, sold direct, with an enormous catalogue and the unusual courtesy of offering most designs in several widths so that you can actually match the bow to your face. The house is a specialist rather than a brand extension, and the difference shows.
10. Drake’s, London
Savile Row and Clifford Street
Founded in 1977, and the house most responsible for how a generation of men now think about neckwear. Drake’s makes bow ties in the same English silks as its famous ties, with a slightly softer, less formal hand than Jermyn Street.
The one to buy if your bow tie is going on with a tweed jacket rather than a dinner suit.
Also worth knowing: The Bow Tie Club and Carrot & Gibbs for range and for club and regimental patterns done correctly. Clifton Wilson out of Philadelphia for pattern and colour. Sam Hober in Chiang Mai, which cuts every bow to your own measurements in Thai silk. Brackish in Charleston, which makes bow ties from feathers and is far better than that description suggests. And the great houses, Hermès, Bulgari and Ferragamo, which make excellent bow ties that nobody buys a bow tie specifically for.
What to buy first, and in what order
One. Black silk barathea or grosgrain, butterfly shape, self-tie. This is the black tie bow and it will outlive you. Turnbull & Asser or Charvet.
Two. A navy or burgundy in a small repeating pattern, for daytime and for dinner that is not black tie. Something you can wear with a tweed jacket without looking like a waiter.
Three. Whatever you actually like. This is the point at which the bow tie stops being formalwear and starts being yours, and it is where Fine and Dandy, Cinabre and Seigo earn their places.
Do not buy a novelty print. Do not buy a matching set with a pocket square, which announces that both were chosen by a shop rather than by you. And do not buy pre-tied, no matter how late it is.
The bow tie is the only garment that requires a skill to wear. That is exactly why it is worth wearing.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.