Standing inside a red brick landmark that seems more suited to Harvard Yard than to its actual location in Manhattan's Nolita district, Alexander Olch, a 30-year-old Crimson alum, is at once studious and nonchalant. His wavy red hair is not overtly styled but certainly not let go either — a description that might just as easily fit his line of ties. He's wearing one in olive-green English linen with diagonal white stripes, and he calls its tapered cut but one of "a few hundred small decisions that no one's really going to be able to pinpoint," the sum of which "actually seems to add up to something."

This is precisely the philosophical approach one might expect from a tie-designing filmmaker. Or is it a filmmaking tie designer? Put it this way: The neckwear project grew out of gifts he had made for the crew on his short film from 2000, Artemin Goldberg: Custom Tailor of Brassieres, and has evolved into a successful business venture that includes a Web site (olch.com) and, starting this fall, placement in retail stores internationally.

Olch prefers to save the labels for his knitted and woven creations, which start at $130 each. "I just like to make things," he tells me over cucumber hummus and lemonade at Café Gitane, a downtown bistro, where he touches on everything from late nights at the Beatrice Inn to the role environment plays in one's aesthetic decisions. (Perhaps the two aren't so far apart.)

Like the superb Italian corduroy Olch used in his latest collection, he is part East Coast prep, part Old World charm; uptown co-op meets downtown speakeasy. And his ties, in fabrics ranging from traditional English wool and silk to modern hand-knits and Belgian linen mesh, are just as hard to peg to a certain era. It is an intentional blur. "You don't want someone to be able to walk in and say 'That's Miami, 1970,'" Olch notes. More like Cambridge, circa whenever.