How To Tie A Pratt a.k.a. Shelby Knot & What Shirt Collar To Wear It With

Welcome back to our series on how to tie a tie .

Today .

I'm going to show you how to tie the Pratt knot , which is also known as the Shelby knot .

The was first worn in the US during World War Two and then an American named Jerry Pratt , um , started wearing it exclusively in the late fifties .

It never became really popular until a man showed the knot in 1986 to the local news anchor , Don Shelby three years afterwards .

In 1989 the New York Times picked up on it in the Daily Telegraph in England and they named it the Shelby knot being one of the first knots that was named after a living person in a long time .

I'm wearing it here right now .

A Mohair linen wool blend tie from Ford Belvedere .

And you can see it's not a small knot , but , um , here is how you tie it first .

You start out tie sea side up and you want the slimmer end in your right hand and the wider end in your left hand .

Um , the length of the slimmer end is about 1.5 hand widths above your waistband , ok .

Slim end goes over the , the wide end .

Now you take the bottom part of the right end goes up .

You always stay on the right side and through the hole , pulling it down .

Now you get this , this little notch here and you want this to be tight .

Ok ?

The next step , you take the wide end , bring it to your left like so tighten it up a little bit and now from the back to bring the wide end up , hold it up like so now the wide end goes through the knot and now you just pull it through , you wanna adjust it and uh pull it up .

You can see it forms a dimple automatically because you had that knot just on one side hole at the slim end , bring it up and adjust your knot .

The Pratt A K Shelby knot , the Pratt knot uses slightly less fabric than half Windsor or Windsor knot .

Yet it gives you like uh an interesting shape .

It's a little more symmetrical .

You get the dimple automatically and uh if you use a thick tie like this one here from Fort Bel , it automatically creates a big knot as you can see .

So this kind of a big knot only works with cutaway collars or um really widespread colors .

So don't try wearing this with a classic color because the color ends will overlap your not here , which does not look very nice .

You definitely do not want to wear this kind of a tie with a collar pin or a collar bar .

Much Shroder go for an Oriental or a four in hand knot because this is simply too big .

If you like the look of this tie , you should definitely check out our shop where we can carry all kinds of ford velvet ties in unusual fabrics that stand out from the crowd .

Thank you and stay tuned for more .

how to tie your tie videos in the near future .