How To Tie The Nicky Knot

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In the past few weeks, we introduced you to our How To Tie A Tie Video Tutorials. Today, we would like to end this series with the Nicky tie knot. It’s a fuller, asymmetrical knot that works well with wider collars.

Table of Contents

In case you missed any of the previous videos, you can find all of them here:

  1. How To Tie The Oriental Knot
  2. How To Tie The Four In Hand Knot
  3. How To Tie The Kelvin Knot
  4. How To Tie The Pratt a.k.a. Shelby Knot
  5. How To Tie The Windsor Knot
  6. How To Tie The Half-Windsor Knot
  7. How To Tie The Victoria Knot

Transcript – How To Tie The Nicky Knot

Welcome back for another installment on How to tie Ties. In this video, I’m going to show you how to tie the Nicky Knot.

Basically, the Nicky is a Four in hand or a Victoria knot on steroids. It’s just simply bigger but slightly asymmetrical unlike the Windsor or Half Windsor knot. Its name is derived from the middle east tie maker, Nicky and it was actually invented by their salesman Ernesto Curami who just came up with this knot. This has been rather popular in Italy but outside of Italy, it never really made its mark. In terms of size, the Nicky knot is between a Four in hand and a Half Windsor, so the Nicky is right here. So basically in a grander scheme of things, you have the full Windsors, very big, Half Windsor and then the Nicky and the Four in hand. As you can see in this example, it’s still a big knot because I used a very thick silk tie by Fort Belvedere. If you use a thinner tie, it will be a smaller knot.

Here is how you tie it: You want to start seam side up on both ends and you want to have the shorter end, the slimmer end on your right hand and the wider end on your left hand. The Slim end should be about a hand and a half above your waistband. The slimmer end goes on top of the wide end then you bring up the wide end, pull it up, pull down and then you pull it to the other side. Now, we bring back the wide end back over and back up. If you have a little wrinkle, make sure you get rid of that.

Now, pull it up tight and you bring the front shell of the tie back through the knot like so, hold it in place and pull through. If it falls over, make sure it unfolds. Pull, put in a little pinch if you want a dimple and if you like it in place, pull the slimmer end up and wiggle until you like it. Now it’s time to adjust the knot until I like the entire look of it, move it around and there you go. Voila! The Nicky knot.

The Nicky knot works with a thin tie, a medium thick tie and a thick tie like this yellow jacquard silk one from Fort Belvedere. In terms of collar choices, this type of knot is best with a medium spread to slightly cutaway collar. It’s not ideal with a really wide spread collar like this one because you can see the tie ends on the side which you should avoid. A classic collar may also not be ideal because the collar is much narrower and it may overlap with the knot. So ideally, go with the medium spread to slightly spread shirt collar and you’ll be fine no matter you have a thin or a thick fabric. Obviously it’s a big knot so don’t wear it with tab collars, collar pins or bars because it simply won’t work. If you want to wear a collar pin or a tab collar, go with the Oriental or the Four in Hand knot.

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Reader Comments

  1. Truly enjoyed your instructional video on the “Nicky tie knot” in fact all your how to on various necktie knots are very helpful and has inspired me to try different knots thanks so very much!

  2. Thank you so much for all the tie knot videos! So the Nicky knot is a retarded Shelby? By that I mean, Nicky took a perfectly symmetrical Shelby/Pratt knot and made it asymmetrical.

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