Polo Ralph Lauren

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

Launched With Ties, Known for a Shirt

Polo Ralph Lauren was launched in 1967 with a line of men's ties, and by 1969 had a boutique store within Bloomingdale's on 59th Street and Third Avenue in New York City. The product the brand is known for came later than the founding product: the most famous piece is the Ralph Lauren Polo, a polo shirt featuring the Polo Horse on the upper right of the shirt. That small embroidered figure does the identifying work for the whole label — a single garment type, in a casual category, carrying a mark small enough to sit on the chest and recognisable enough to stand for the brand. Ralph Lauren specialises in casual and semi-formal wear for men and women, and the polo shirt sits exactly on that boundary: a knitted shirt that can be worn as casual dress or, in the right setting, as semi-formal dress, which is why it could become the emblem of a range covering both.

A Brand Inside a Designer's Portfolio

Polo Ralph Lauren is described as one of the many brands of clothing designed by Ralph Lauren, not as the designer's only label. That structure — a named designer operating several brands — allows different price points and different degrees of formality to be separated by name while sharing one design identity. The scale reached by that structure is stated plainly: Ralph Lauren is the United States' largest fashion designer and retailer, with sales in excess of five billion dollars a year. The brand's wider footprint extends beyond clothing into fragrances, the restaurant RL in Chicago, and sponsorship of a Harlem cancer center in association with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Fragrance is the standard extension for a clothing name; a restaurant and a cancer center sponsorship are not, and they mark a label presenting itself as a broader lifestyle and civic presence in the cities where it sells.

The Rhinelander Mansion Flagship

The flagship store is located in the Rhinelander Mansion at 867 Madison Avenue at 72nd Street in New York City. The choice of a mansion rather than a conventional shopfront is itself part of the brand's presentation: a house as a store makes the retail space read as a residence furnished in the label's style, which suits a designer whose clothing specialises in the casual and semi-formal dress of an established social world. Set against the brand's beginning — a line of men's ties in 1967 and a boutique inside Bloomingdale's two years later — the Madison Avenue mansion measures the distance travelled, from a counter within another retailer's store to a landmark building carrying the designer's own name, in the same city where the brand started.

Casual and Semi-Formal in One Shirt

The brand's specialisation in casual and semi-formal wear for men and women is a wide territory, covering two of the dress codes most people move between daily. The polo shirt succeeds there because it is ambiguous by design: knitted like a casual shirt, collared like a formal one. Placing the Polo Horse on the upper right of the shirt makes that ambiguity visible and branded at once, so a wearer can signal the label in settings where a larger logo would be out of place. From the 1967 line of men's ties — an accessory at the most formal end of menswear — to a knitted shirt worn across casual and semi-formal settings, the brand's history is a movement outward from one formal accessory to a full wardrobe for both men and women.