While learning to tie it, Mocka made mistakes. The surface of the triangle, however, is split into five overlapping sheaths, which make the knot look almost like a braid. The Eldredge knot has the upside-down-triangle shape of a traditional knot. “I kept being, like, ‘Don’t you see how cool this is? This is the perfect Windsor.’ ” When Mocka showed up for work, his friend was getting ready to go home. The night before his first day, he stayed up late learning to tie the Windsor knot, hoping to make a good impression. His wife was pregnant and he needed health insurance, so he got a union job as a doorman, at an apartment building where one of his friends worked. Mocka invented his first tie knot in 2013, when he was forty-four. Finally, he spent a decade at the 2nd Ave Deli, where he met his wife, and worked his way up from cleaner to manager, which allowed him to rent his own apartment. (He says he never lost.) He taught fighting lessons in the East Village, delivered marijuana, and worked as a porter. “I’ve slept in trains, I’ve slept in staircases.” To earn some money, but also to prove to himself that he could beat anyone, he fought in underground, bare-knuckle boxing matches, using a French form of kickboxing that he’d learned in the military. “I was going back and forth between friends’ houses until I would outwear my welcome,” he said. Mocka told me that when he returned to New York, he was homeless and suicidal for a time. With only a month left in his service, he wanted to be discharged his assigned psychiatrist told him that pleading insanity was the only option, so he did. He head-butted a drill sergeant, and spent time in a penal colony in French Guiana. Before Mocka matriculated, however, he was drafted into the French military and shipped to Martinique. (They no longer speak, and his mother could not be reached for comment.) Eventually, he befriended a family member of the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who helped him get into a leading art school, the Cooper Union. His relationship with his mother was fraught, and he occasionally ran away and slept on the streets. “We knew better, because it’s called practice,” he said.Īt eleven, Mocka joined his birth mother in New York, where she worked for the French consulate, and he eventually enrolled in the United Nations International School. By the time Mocka turned ten, people were telling him that his artistic skills were a gift from God. He was adopted by a man who painted in his free time, and who inspired Mocka to pick up drawing. His father died when he was two, and his mother moved to New York without him. He was born in Martinique in 1969 and was raised in Paris. His path to sartorial invention is as winding as his silken creations. Mocka is not a physicist, or a menswear designer, but a doorman in my apartment building. “I’m very obsessed with being original,” Mocka told me. The Riddler looks like a question mark, and the Exousia requires more than one tie. The Gardenia looks like a flower the Wicker and the Mockatonic look like origami. Mocka alone has created more than fifteen hundred knots. In 1999, two physicists published a book titled “ The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie.” Their tally, however, was far from comprehensive. But there are many others: the Plattsburgh, the Cavendish, the Hanover. Boris Mocka believes that, at one point, he had invented more necktie knots than anyone else on the planet-so many that he started to call himself a “tieknotologist.” Most people who wear ties are familiar with the four-in-hand knot, and perhaps the Windsor and the half-Windsor.
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