January 4, 2012 |
RALPH LAUREN: His name might well be Ralph Lauren, and he might well be one of the founding fathers of modern American fashion, but don’t call him “fashion”. “I’m not a fashion person. I’m anti fashion. I don’t like to be part of that world. It’s too transient. I have never been influenced by it. I’m interested in longevity, timelessness, style – not fashion.”
The thing about Ralph is he has a knack. Until he sold us on images of the American West, who really – apart from the Village People in their still-foetal stages and cowboys – wanted to look like, well, cowboys? Same goes for his visions of the English gentry, African safaris, even the ubiquitous polo players. As Colin McDowell puts it, “Ralph Lauren gave America a sense of aspirational pride, not just in his clothes and brilliant marketing approach, but in the fact that he gave them British class in a way that, for the first time in over 200 years, didn’t leave them feeling culturally and socially inferior.” Whatever it is, if it’s touched by Ralph’s fair hand, we all want it. Now. And, right now, that would be denim.
To be honest, not a week goes by when someone doesn’t slap their name on the back of a pair of jeans, calls them designer and then charges the price of a black market kidney for them. Even Ralph readily admits that, “Denim is not the newest thing in town, so the question is, what’s new?” The answer is, it seems, luxury denim. “When we opened our stores I noticed that the girls were coming in wearing jeans and I said, ‘How can I do a denim brand that will fit with the way the woman wears collection pants. I thought there is no denim for this woman. They can buy one or two pieces from a designer brand, but really there is not a brand that has the fit, the details, the stretch, the vision and the point of view. It’s a fabric that doesn’t die. Its already part of a woman’s life. This gives it a stylishness and diversity that makes it very interesting.” The collection isn’t “going to be about a denim shirt. It’s too iconic. I didn’t want to do cowboys here. This is really about sophisticated dressing”. The result is a capsule offering of chic denim separates based on the mainline Ralph Lauren Collection. All the classic staples you’d expect are there, from tuxedos and trench coats through to jodhpurs and even a rather snazzy jumpsuit. Of course, no matter how hard you try, denim knit is not ever likely to happen, so the collection has been padded out with a few basic essentials such as the white shirt and classic knit. For him it’s really all about the contradiction, “the freedom of taking a pattern or fabric and using it in an untraditional way”.
You could say that, with this collection, Ralph Lauren is, in a way, having fun with that tired cliché of American fashion: “they only sell blue jeans”. But then, he’s been having fun with it since his first Westernwear (the name says it all) collection in 1978, where, rather memorably, Betsey Johnson made a guest catwalk appearance dressed in a long red mink, with concho belt and gold cowboy boots. The collection, though, wasn’t all disco excess. That’s not his style. It was about filling a void, creating a world that actually lives up to the dream. As the story goes, a trip to Dallas did not yield the cinematic cowboys he’d expected to find, or the fringed jackets he’d wanted to buy for his kids, so they needed to be created. His world is built entirely on the strength of his imagination. As Ralph says, “My clothes are always visions of what I believe in. Someone once told I was a writer and it’s true – I write through my clothes. They’re whole stories, not just clothes.”
Back in 2000, Miguel Adrover sent Omahyra down his catwalk dressed in a white T-shirt with an oversized polo player embroidered on it. The Ralph Lauren polo player. As he later explained, “Every Spanish boy, Puerto Rican boy, Dominican boy wants Ralph Lauren, and maybe he has no money, so he would hand stitch the logo at home.” His collection was “about trying to open people’s eyes to society. To leave out Ralph Lauren would have been naïve”. It’s perhaps the most apt comment on how much one brand has burned itself onto the collective retina, on one brand’s reach. Everyone aspires to Ralph Lauren. Everyone wants a piece of it on their back.
He is, for want of a better term, the definition of the American, well, “world”. But for this we’ll stick with American dream. Going from being a necktie salesman to heading up his own multi-billion dollar company. Growing up in the same part of the Bronx as his most successful contemporary Calvin Klein, no less. And now he’s, if you will, creating that dream for everyone else. Redefining its meaning and aspirations. It’s a fantasy of what your life (you can insert the Ralph Lauren “life” of your choosing, really) might have been like as interpreted by modern times. Through his shops, which we would happily move into, to his Bruce Weber-shot campaigns, which resemble more cinematic stills than a mere promotional tool. American luxury for Ralph is about an approach to living. You see the images and are tempted to stick your head over the models so that, just for a moment, you can revel in the dream. “Americans are about the casual life,” says Ralph. “They love comfort and informality. When I was growing up, people dressed for the weekends the way they did during the week. It wasn’t until American life evolved and people started moving to the suburbs and having cookouts and enjoying more free time that there was a need for more comfortable clothes. I was creating American sportswear – clothes for living, as opposed to outfits for special occasions or work. Sportswear is about living, and that’s where America has made its mark.” It’s also where Ralph has made his.
Essentially, the heart of what Ralph does comes down to just one sentence: “To design without fashion in mind, to design something legendary that has a sense of timelessness, a forever-ness that still excites us, is what I aspire to.” Put a tweed jacket circa 1970 next to a jacket from the last collection and you can see it’s true. He’s more a creator of modern classics than purveyor of seasonal trends. The design process doesn’t start with a question about sleeves, whether the mutton variety are hot for winter. It’s starts with a blank canvas of an alternative world waiting to be furnished. He is, in a nutshell, the Charles Eames of clothes.
Before Ralph Lauren came along, says Colin McDowell, “denim was a low-grade American working fabric that hardly ventured outside the back yard until Ralph Lauren made it chic and feminised it into clothing as sexy and as confident as the chicest silk pants from Paris – et voilà! It was accepted even on presidential patios!” Or, if you prefer, there is the rather crass, “You can’t spell class without ass.” And you can’t have class, or a good denim-clad ass, without Ralph Lauren.
by Natalie Dembinska
