From the golden arches of McDonalds to the red and white swirl of Coca-Cola, the world has become an almighty advertising board for the marketing machine of down-home America.
Each brand is an identity: we associate things with them, we judge people based on their corporate affiliations. They sell a lifestyle.
No American company does this quite like Ralph Lauren. With its enigmatic polo player logo emblazoned on countless garments across the world, the brand offers its customers entry into the idealised world of an accessible high society, bypassing as it does the usual need for a pristine genealogy.
How Lauren dressed Hollywood stars
- Among the usual suspects of JFK and Cary Grant, Ralph Lauren always listed F Scott Fitzgerald as one his personal icons. As such, it must have come as a pleasant surprise to have been enlisted to design the clothes worn in the Hollywood production of The Great Gatsby in 1974
- The link is even more salient given that Gatsby, like Lauren, was a self-made millionaire who changed his name to create a glamorous image and transcend his upbringing. The fit was perfect, with the brand’s penchant for heritage clothing perfectly mirroring the upper class 1920s style of the book
- It certainly helped that the dashing Robert Redford, fresh from the dual successes of Butch Cassidy and The Sting, was draped head to toe in the finest bespoke three-piece suits of Ralph Lauren, while Mia Farrow’s glamorous costumes triggered a Jazz Age fashion trend that gripped the US and Europe
- Three years later Lauren would strike again in Woody Allen’s multi-Oscar winning opus Annie Hall. The impact was colossal. If Gatsby was a demonstration of the finery that Lauren could produce, Annie Hall was a showcase of the effortlessly casual, preppy style that Ralph himself wore
- In an unheard of move, he styled the titular character in a non-specific blend of male and female clothing, pairing men’s ties and baggy trousers with women’s shirts.This seemingly simple choice inspired countless women to copy the style sported by lead actress Diane Keaton
- As such, both films acted as an extended advert for the Polo lifestyle, and it certainly helped that Hollywood icons Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton and Woody Allen were all draped in the regalia of the label. The public went crazy, a generation was inspired and Lauren solidified his place as the American designer of the moment
"I'm not designing clothes; I'm creating a world," the 70-year-old once declared. Over the last 40 years Lauren has sculpted a fashion empire that offers a world of glamour and elegance unsurpassed by rival American fashion houses. His designs are firmly rooted in both a collegiate, preppy world and an American West that seems both familiar and timeless.
By melding his vision of America with romanticised aspects of European civility, Lauren brings together the old world with the new to create a unique identity linked with the brand. This timeless blend of quasi-English countryside and sepia-tinted American West denotes his trademark ‘anti-fashion’ stance, offering clothes that aren’t dependent on temporary fashion trends. But the decadent images conjured up by his various clothing lines couldn't be further from his roots.
Immigrants
Born in 1939 as Ralph Rueben Lifshitz to Jewish Belarusian immigrants, he grew up sharing a room with two of his brothers in New York City's notorious Bronx. Although not an obvious breeding ground for future fashion icons, the Bronx somehow spawned both Lauren and his long-standing contemporary Calvin Klein. Lauren and Klein would both cite the Bronx’s rhythmic pulse as a key influence on their work.
The Lifshitz family's arrival in the Big Apple mirrors the story of millions of immigrants during the period, each seeking salvation in the New World to escape poverty or persecution in search of a new opportunity, a second chance.
In 1920, Lauren's grandfather Shlomo, a creative, left the Belarusian town of Pinsk with his son and daughter in tow to escape the new wave of Russian collectivisation. They fled to New York where, twenty years later, Ralph's father Frank met a fellow Jewish Belarusian immigrant and married her, raising their four children in a modest apartment. Frank Lifshitz was a struggling artist who found himself painting houses to make a living.
This vagabond start in life didn't inhibit young Ralph's taste for the finer things. Fashion has clearly always fascinated him, leading him to take an after school job to pay for the expensive, classically cut suits he felt an uncommon desire for. It was during this period that his entrepreneurial side began to manifest, and before long he was selling handmade neckties to fellow high school students. He even got his first fashion commission aged 15 when he was asked to design the red satin warm-up jackets for his school baseball team.
Name change
A year later, Ralph and his brother Jerry changed their surname from the unforgiving Lifshitz to the urbane Lauren. While it’s all too easy to assume this change was to make the protagonist seem less like an immigrant’s son - Polo Ralph Lifshitz doesn’t quite have the same ring to it - Lauren’s own reasoning was much more matter-of-fact: “My given name has the word ‘shit’ in it. When I was a kid, the other kids would make a lot of fun of me. It was a tough name. That’s why I decided to change it. Then people said, ‘Did you change your name because you don’t want to be Jewish?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. That’s not what it’s about.’”
