How Drake's London Revived the Handmade Tie

Michael Drake founded Drake's in 1977 in London's East End, at a time when British neckwear manufacturing was retreating to factory production and the handmade tie was becoming a relic of pre-industrial craft. His conviction that hand-cut, hand-rolled, and hand-sewn ties possessed a quality that machine production could not replicate seemed quixotic in the efficiency-obsessed late 1970s.

The Drake's tie is distinguished by details invisible to the untrained eye but immediately apparent to the hand. Each tie is cut by hand from a single piece of silk — the bias cut at a precise forty-five-degree angle to the selvedge that allows the fabric to drape and recover from knotting without distortion. Machine-cut ties approximate this angle but rarely achieve the precision of a skilled hand cutter.

The hand-rolled edge — where the silk is folded over the interlining and stitched by hand with a slip stitch — creates a slightly irregular, rounded edge that is softer and more dimensional than the pressed, machine-sewn edge of factory ties. This handwork is the single greatest determinant of a tie's visual and tactile quality, and it cannot be economically replicated by machinery.

Drake's produces approximately one hundred and fifty thousand ties annually at its workshop in London, using silks sourced primarily from English and Italian mills. The company commissions exclusive prints — paisleys, geometrics, and florals — that are designed in-house and woven or printed to Drake's specifications, ensuring that the same pattern is not available from competing brands (https://www.drakes.com).

Under the creative direction of Michael Hill, who acquired the company in 2010, Drake's expanded from ties into a full menswear range that reflects the same craft-first philosophy. Their shirts, jackets, knitwear, and scarves are produced in English and Italian workshops using the same attention to hand-finishing that distinguishes the ties — creating a coherent wardrobe from a single aesthetic sensibility.

The Drake's revival of the handmade tie coincided with the broader menswear renaissance of the 2010s, when a generation of men discovered, through blogs and social media, that details like hand-rolled edges and untipped construction communicated taste more effectively than designer labels. Drake's, by making these details affordable relative to Italian luxury houses, democratised sartorial knowledge.

Drake's proves that craft businesses can thrive in an era of mass production by targeting an audience that values process as much as product. The handmade tie survived not because it is cheaper or more convenient than its machine-made alternative, but because a significant minority of men can feel the difference and are willing to pay a modest premium for it. That minority, it turns out, is large enough to sustain a thriving business.