Ralph Lauren

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

The Bronx Kid Who Bought Suits

Lauren's beginning is the opposite of his brand's image, and the contrast is the story. He was born Ralph Lipschitz in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants; his father was a house painter. From a very young age he worked after school to earn money to buy stylish, expensive suits, preferring quality over quantity, and his attire gave him a trendy reputation among his peers. That schoolboy habit contains the whole later business in miniature: clothes bought not for warmth or conformity but as a chosen identity, and a willingness to spend on quality rather than quantity. The comparison drawn with the interior designer Robert Denning makes the point explicit. Both men grew up without fashion or society and went on to create, for others, an environment of society, old-money and country-club style — a world neither had any exposure to as a child, but each could visualise and create as a dream. Lauren's genius was not inheriting that world but imagining it more completely than the people born into it.

The practical steps were modest. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, changed his surname to Lauren at 16 with his older brother Jerry, studied business at City College and dropped out after two years, served in the United States Army from 1962 to 1964, and married Ricky Low-Beer after his discharge. He did not attend fashion school. He learned the trade by selling it, as a salesman for Brooks Brothers — the most established name in American classic clothing — for whom he created the label Polo.

From a Tie Business to an Empire

The founding sequence is precise. He purchased the Polo name from Brooks Brothers in 1967 and in 1968 opened his own tie business, Polo Fashions, after securing a 50,000 dollar loan. Starting with ties was strategically shrewd: a tie is the cheapest item of classic menswear, the piece where a man can adopt a style for the price of a lunch, and it let a new label enter wardrobes before it could afford to make suits. From ties the empire widened into a complete wardrobe and then into a complete world. In 1984 he recreated the Rhinelander Mansion in New York into the flagship store for Polo Ralph Lauren — a mansion, not a shop, as the setting for the clothes, because the brand sells the environment as much as the garment. In the mid 1990s Polo Ralph Lauren became a public company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RL, and Lauren added brands at every level: Purple Label for high-end formalwear, Polo Jeans Co. for younger and more casual wear, and from late 2004 Rugby, targeted towards college consumers, with stores in Boston, Charlottesville, Chapel Hill and New York.

A Lifestyle, a Family and a Car Collection

The structure just described explains why Lauren is described as building an environment rather than a clothing line. Each brand tier corresponds to a room in the same imagined house: Purple Label for the formal evening, Polo for the country-club day, Polo Jeans and Rugby for the young. A customer can enter at the tie counter as a teenager and still be inside the same world, at a higher price, thirty years later. That is the commercial meaning of the dream he visualised as a boy buying suits in the Bronx — it was never a single product, so it could expand indefinitely without changing its subject.

His family is woven into the business: his wife Ricky and their children Andrew, David and Dylan, with David an executive at Ralph Lauren Media. His other famous collection is of classic automobiles, which have won best in show at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance multiple times and were displayed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The cars are not a separate hobby so much as the same taste in another material — beautifully made machines from an era of craftsmanship, preserved and presented as objects of style. A designer who collects prize-winning classic cars and sells an old-money world is, in both cases, curating an idealised past and inviting the public to step into it.