BRUISER BOW TIE
by forage

It all started with a cabin in the woods and 150 bow ties.

When Stephen Loidolt and Shauna Alterio thought up Forage, they conceived of it as a one-off project—not the full-blown line of upbeat, vintage-inflected bow ties it is today. Thankfully, they documented the process, and Shauna is happy to recount the tale of their beginnings.


The worksite

“We had a show at the Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco, and they basically told us, ‘Do whatever you want.’ So we were tossing around a bunch of ideas—we wanted to make something that we hadn’t made before. That’s kind of our favorite thing—to do something that we never expected that we would do. All of the ideas we came up with seemed equally ridiculous, and Stephen wanted to make bow ties.”


Bow-tie construction underway

“We booked ourselves a week at a cabin in West Virginia and made every single bow tie for the show. We made 150 bow ties. And while we were making them, we were sitting there telling ourselves, ‘What are we going to do with 150 bow ties if nobody buys them? This is insane!’”


The first collection

“Before we even left the opening for the show, we already knew we’d have to replenish the stock because they were doing so well. It was super unexpected. Stephen had been wearing bow ties for a while, but we just weren’t sure that anybody else would love them that much, too.”

Come back tomorrow to see Shauna and Stephen’s latest creations: the ties they designed just for Of a Kind.

These design celebrities make a solid case for taking the accessory seriously.

Stephen Loidolt and Shauna Alterio have built their line, Forage, around the bow tie—which gets treated like a second-class citizen in the menswear world. Stephen has always had a personal affection for what he calls the safest form of neckwear—the type least likely to get you into trouble in a woodshop, or to attract your lunch. But when the duo set off to research their chosen accoutrement, they uncovered a group of well-respected, stylistically significant architects and designers who also had a penchant for the bow tie—powerhouses whose work Shauna and Stephen had worshipped for years. “When we were undergrads, we had two instructors who were mid-century design fanatics, and so we both started to love that era independently, before we even knew each other,” Shauna explains. Here, Shauna shares inspiration photos of the guys who really knew how to make the look work.


Charles Eames, 1907-1978


Eero Saarinen, 1910-1961


Le Corbusier, 1887-1965


Richard Schultz, 1926-present


Arne Jacobsen, 1902-1971


Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867-1959


Louis Kahn, 1901-1974

Come back Wednesday to score the edition—a bow tie, if you hadn’t guessed—that Shauna and Stephen made just for us.

The duo creates every last component of their bow ties themselves.

Usually when designers make a piece by hand, they draw the line somewhere, outsourcing the packaging, for example, or the tags. But the hyper-engaged duo behind the appealingly throwback bow-tie line Forage is big on follow-through. This is how, in Shauna’s words, they took the 20 bow ties they made for us from vintage fabric to finished product.

Click here to scoop up one of the painstakingly made bow ties Stephen and Shauna created exclusively for Of a Kind.


“I cut everything, interface it, and pin it. We cut all of the fabric on a bias—on an angle. This allows it to twist and move more freely, but it also means there’s a considerable amount of waste on either side of a piece of material.”


“Steven’s actually the master sewer—he has crazy attention to detail—so then he’ll take it over with our machine.”


“Then I take the bow tie back and do the trimming and ironing, and I put all the hardware together.”


“We knew we wanted to print on the boxes somehow. Gocco printing is pretty well-known, but it’s difficult to find the materials. Because of its awkward size, to print on a box, we had to make this weird jig out of a piece of plywood.”


“At any given time, we’ll have like 200 boxes all sitting in perfect rows waiting for the ties. I love a mass of anything. Any time I can make lots and lots of one thing, I’m happy. It’s so nerdy.”


“We letterpress all of the tags ourselves on a vintage C&P Pilot. We like to keep the packaging nice and neutral—give it an old-school masculine feeling. A lot of the time, we’ll push the boundaries with the materials or patterns of the bow ties, and so we like to circle back and keep everything else more traditional.”