Walk into almost any boardroom and the tie around the neck probably came from Shengzhou — a Zhejiang city that makes roughly 60% of the world's neckties and about 90% of every tie sold in China. For centuries it shipped its silk to Italy to be made into ties. Then it started making the ties itself.
Shengzhou, a city of some 650,000 people in the silk country of eastern Zhejiang, makes most of the neckties on Earth — by various counts somewhere between half and two-thirds of them, and around 90% of every tie sold inside China. Roughly a thousand or so manufacturers turn out on the order of 300 million ties a year, for customers running the full span from budget chains like Primark to luxury houses like Armani and the owners of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. It is one of the quietest near-monopolies in global manufacturing: almost nobody who knots a tie knows the name of the town that made it.
Shengzhou has woven silk for centuries, and for most of that time its role was to supply other people's looms — sending raw silk to places like Como, in Italy, to be turned into the world's finest ties and scarves. The modern story is the reversal of that arrangement. Around the mid-1980s a cluster of tie makers took root in Shengzhou, pooled their strengths, and began making the finished ties themselves — capturing the profit that had always gone abroad. The town that fed Italy's silk trade set about replacing it.
The advantage was the usual one, sharpened. Skilled, experienced sewers worked for a fraction of Italian or American wages; local government added cheap land and easy loans; and the town did one thing, completely. Former farmers became necktie multimillionaires. Two quiet ironies sit at the centre of it: most people in the necktie capital do not wear ties — they are too busy making them — and about half of the world's ties are bought as gifts, by women, for the men who will wear them. The town's whole fortune rests on a garment its makers skip and its wearers rarely buy for themselves.
There is a catch built into the victory. The necktie's golden years ran from about 1990 to 2000; since then the slow casualisation of how the world dresses has steadily eaten demand. Shengzhou cornered a market just as that market began to contract. The strain shows: a credit crunch around 2015 shut well over a hundred local tie firms, and the survivors live with thin margins squeezed between rising costs and falling sales. It is the rare cluster that has to defend total dominance over a product the world is slowly giving up.
The way up has been to stop merely copying. Where Shengzhou's firms once simply reproduced the designs customers brought them, the leaders now originate their own — one built what it calls the largest database of tie patterns in the world — and the town is moving into buying foreign brands and spreading its silk skills into scarves and bedding. Set beside the other deep dives, Shengzhou is the town that took a craft from Italy on price, then had to take it on design too: a near-total monopoly, defending a beautiful and slowly fading object, by learning to make it better rather than only cheaper.