The tie gets a bad reputation these days partly because the occasions that require one have become less frequent and partly because so many men only wear one when they’re forced to which means they’ve never really learned how to make one work. We’ve been guilty of this ourselves. Showing up to something with a tie that was clearly an afterthought knotted too short or too long or in a way that suggested we’d watched a YouTube tutorial once three years ago and hoped for the best. A silk tie done right is genuinely one of the sharpest things a man can wear. The knot matters. The dimple below the knot matters more than you’d think. The width of the tie should roughly match the width of your lapels. None of this is complicated once you know it but it’s the kind of thing that separates an outfit that looks properly finished from one that looks like you got dressed in a hurry and hoped nobody would notice.