There was a time when a necktie was a mandatory uniform — a daily tax levied on office workers, lawyers, and corporate ladder-climbers. For most men, tying a Windsor knot every morning felt like submitting to a small, silky oppression. But for a select few, wearing a tie was never an obligation. It was an art, a ritual, a quiet statement of personal style.
Thirty years ago, as the golden era of classic menswear began to fade, I found myself looking for a replacement for Sulka. Founded in 1895 in New York by Amos Sulka and Leon Wormser, A. Sulka & Company was once the ultimate arbiter of luxury haberdashery — legendary for its opulent silk robes, bespoke dress shirts, and, above all, its rich, heavyweight silk ties. Its clientele read like a who’s who of the twentieth century: royalty, Hollywood titans like Clark Gable and Cary Grant, statesmen like Winston Churchill. A Sulka tie was an uncompromising commitment to craft, pattern, and color. When Sulka eventually vanished from the retail landscape, it left a real void — not just a gap in the market, but a gap for men who saw neckwear as wearable art rather than corporate armor.
Then I stepped into a tiny shop on Madison Avenue and met Seigo Katsuragawa.
To enter Seigo Neckwear on the Upper East Side is to step into a universe governed by an entirely different set of aesthetic rules. Seigo himself may be the most elegant and dapper man in New York City — a vision of flawless tailoring, quiet confidence, and immaculate taste. For thirty years he has curated ties woven from fine silks in Kyoto, patterned with jacquards and textures you simply won’t find anywhere else. Hold one up to the light, and you understand immediately why men who have never met him speak of him on a first-name basis.
Unlike standard luxury neckwear, Seigo’s creations are made in extraordinarily limited runs — often just six or eight ties per fabric. Once a design sells out, it is gone forever. This isn’t a marketing gimmick; it’s a devotion to individuality that borders on the monastic. The ties often have a label on the back saying “Four of Eight”.
There are, of course, the obvious status-symbol ties — the uniform of Hermès prints worn by consultants, bankers, and lawyers signaling their place in the financial hierarchy. Seigo ties are the anti-uniform. Where Sulka once dressed the world’s icons and Hermès dresses the executive suite, Seigo appeals to a quieter, more discreet kind of patron: connoisseurs, artistically minded New Yorkers, people who have simply stopped caring what a tie signals to anyone else. They aren’t meant to announce status in a boardroom. They’re meant to bring the wearer genuine joy — full stop.
For nearly thirty years, Seigo ties have accompanied me through the defining moments of my life — weddings, milestone celebrations, important debuts, solemn farewells. Each one in my collection carries the specific weight of a memory. Taken together, they form a woven archive of three decades of lived experience, more personal than any photograph.
Wearing a Seigo tie is like belonging to a small, delightfully eccentric secret society. Because the designs are so distinctive and so scarce, wearers can spot each other across a room — a subtle nod on a busy sidewalk, a pause mid-stride, a brief exchange between strangers who both know exactly what they’re looking at:
“Is that a Seigo?”
“It is. From about five years ago?”
“Ah, beautiful — I have the same pattern in green.”
The best of these encounters happened a few years ago, over lunch in the Dining Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Across the room, a gentleman was wearing a tie with a complex, luminous geometric weave that could only have come from one place. Our eyes met; he’d caught me looking. He gave his collar the smallest, knowing adjustment. Before long we were trading notes on our favorite vintage finds like two members of a club so small it doesn’t need a name — because, in a sense, it doesn’t have one. That’s rather the point.
Today the world has dressed down. Like most men, I have far fewer occasions to wear a suit and tie than I did thirty years ago. Casual dress codes have conquered the office, and the daily necktie has all but vanished from professional life. But that decline has, unexpectedly, liberated the tie. When you no longer have to wear one, choosing to wear one becomes an act of pure pleasure rather than compliance.
On the occasions I still put on a tailored jacket and knot a Seigo tie, the ritual feels richer than it ever did in the days when it was mandatory — the weight of the silk, the particular satisfaction of a knot that falls just right, the small private pleasure before anyone else even sees it. It’s a deliberate choice to embrace beauty, color, and craft in an increasingly homogenized world.
Sulka belongs to history now, and the daily corporate necktie may be dead with it. But as long as Seigo Katsuragawa keeps his doors open on Madison Avenue, the joy of dressing well — not for anyone else, but for yourself — remains very much alive.
