The rectangular box on the front doormat is sealed with packing tape bearing mysterious script. The cursive words whisper about the contents, an imperative regarding what’s inside: “Welcome to the Club…Shhh!” When the tape rips away, the cardboard lid pops open to reveal not a skeleton key or a talismanic charm, but…a necktie. And according to the tie’s maker, Nathan Green, wearing it will now be an initiation of sorts—into a “secret society” of men who still don them.
The example in the box, a handsome silk number with navy, neon pink, and turquoise block stripes, cradled in a cirrus of tissue paper, speaks to the mission of his company, named (naturally) Secret Society Neckwear. “Before you open your mouth, people will see you,” Green says. Green, who is forty-two, has been studying neckties for years. First as a fraternity pledge compelled to wear them in the morbid heat of LSU football games; then as a salesman obsessed with bow ties at Harper’s Haberdashery in his home state of Louisiana; then as manager at Sid Mashburn in Atlanta, having long since realized that male customers who wanted to wear ties with their jackets were a vanishing breed. Now he works at Shaia’s of Homewood, a century-plus-old menswear shop in Birmingham, where he noticed that, finally, ties “have been behind the eight ball but are making a comeback.”
Green explains his thinking this way: “When business casual rolled in, maybe guys didn’t wear a tie on casual Friday. Then the Gap got their talons in with more and more khaki and casual wear. Fast-forward and COVID put everybody into a tailspin of not just casual wear, but pajamas almost. I work at a retail shop full-time; people come in and go, ‘Nobody wears ties anymore.’ And I’m thinking, Well, people still do; here I am standing in front of you with one. It feels like I’m in this little club when I see guys out and they’re dressed up.”
Green wears a tie six days a week, often with sport coats and jeans. He has more than a hundred of them at home (and just as many bow ties). But he grew up with more raffish aspirations: He wanted to be the lead singer of a hair-metal band, wondering what it would be like to meet Riki Rachtman, the host of MTV’s Headbangers Ball. He eventually fell in love with fashion via a pair of Bo Jackson sneakers, which his mother used “what had to have been two paychecks” to procure for him.
“If you put on a coat and tie, you stand a little taller, you breathe a little deeper,” he says of his ultimate turn toward formality. “You take on the world that way. That’s what the tie gives you—that little oomph to get you over the hump.”
Green got encouragement from Ken Shaia: His current boss threw a long piece of silk, which had been draped around a ceramic penguin statue in the store, at him and said, “If you make a tie with this, I’ll know you’re serious.” Green took the fabric home to his basement sewing machine, YouTubed tie making (“I’d only ever sewn my own bow ties,” he says), and made the first Secret Society tie. Now, along with pocket squares and hats, his company’s website features more than a hundred styles of neckwear. Silks, knits, and bow ties, available in stripes, dots, plaids, abstract patterns, even pheasants and turtles. Each with a little handsewn bar tack in the shape of an x, his company trademark, on the back. Green aims to sprinkle in up to fifty new designs each season, and to make them progressively more hip.
He picked out the pattern and colors for that tie that arrived in the Shhh! box for his first Secret Society collection. The piece was then hand made at one of the last small factories that produce neckwear, in New York, and shipped to his basement, where he now squeezes in his operation. Green actually wore the tie himself to last November’s launch party, where he and some of his friends and coworkers made this toast: “No one wears a tie anymore…but us!”
“That tie speaks to me,” he says. “Something about the colors, the neon pink and turquoise. Just felt very eighties rock and roll to me.”
