I had a lot of nice conversations with vendors on the first day of the MRket tradeshow in Las Vegas—the guys at Piloti, Sal Giardina from Jhane Barnes, Edo Popken, Laurie Aronson from Haspel, Gregor McCluskey from Braeval, and Richard Potapow from Cirrus Cashmere among them—but today's blog will focus on ties.

I've found that despite the gloomy economy,...

Tim Leamy of Sebastian’s Closet in Dallas is positive. “At the end of the day, retailers just live on optimism and hope for the next sale,” he told me. “If we don’t, if we start singing the mantra of doom and gloom ... what alternative do we have than to be as positive as we can?”

I spoke to Leamy recently after I realized we had linked to the wrong...

The first thing I asked Hickey’s design director Aaron Levine when Elise Diamantini and I visited the Hickey offices this week was, “Did the gym shorts mesh tie make it into production?”

Blessedly, it did. I was excited about the narrow knit tie when I saw it at Project New York last July, and I was hoping it wasn’t just a prototype. They call it a mesh...

In a season with few positive stories, it was comforting to be invited to Robert Valdes-Rodriguez’s celebration of a year in the neckwear business. The party, which was at the Pratt Mansion across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wasn’t the only party during New York Market Week, but it could easily be the most stylish. Waiters wearing RVR...

“Our regular client was not queuing on [Jan. 3 and 4] in Milan or Rome but was on the slopes in St. Moritz or on a boat in the Caribbean,” said Versace CEO Giancarlo Di Risio. The haughty executive was quoted in an Italian financial paper last week. He was scoffing at the notion that his core clientele might care about discounts and sales.

People in the...