Captain America

For Ralph Lauren, fashion is not just about designing clothes but creating worlds - and billions of dollars.

AT a gala dinner to celebrate Ralph Lauren's 40th anniversary in business in 2007, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg told the assembled crowd: "If you called Central Casting and said, 'Find me a great New Yorker,' they would send Ralph Lauren."

Lauren’s life story does actually read a little like the plot of a Hollywood movie. He was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx in 1939 to working-class Jewish immigrants who fled Russia in the early 20th century. He changed his name to Lauren (which is pronounced as in Lauren Bacall not Sophia Loren), had a stint in the army, then in 1967 started in the fashion business with a small collection of neckties. Today he is a household name whose business has sales of more than $US5 billion ($5.5 billion) and produces everything from formal wear to sportswear and from fragrance to house paint. And he has the lifestyle to go with it: numerous homes, more than 50 vintage prestige cars as well as planes and helicopters.

Even the Ralph Lauren offices in New York are more like a film set than a business address. Over several floors in a generic Midtown high-rise Lauren has built a corporate headquarters designed to feel like a gentlemen’s club. The wood-panelled waiting room is called a “Reading Room” and is stuffed with worn leather sofas, gilt-framed oil paintings, Chinese vases full of flowers, Persian rugs and soft, mood lighting. It feels like an outpost of his most famous retail outlet, the Rhinelander Mansion on Madison Avenue.

His working method is also more like that of a filmmaker than a fashion designer. He doesn’t sketch his designs and he never attended fashion school. “When I work on a collection I feel like I’m making a movie,” Lauren told WISH. “I want to tell a story so I guess you could say I write through my clothes. Sometimes it takes just one thing to inspire a collection.

It could be a scene from a movie, a little black-and-white photograph, a beautiful old jacket. I am always searching for inspiration from the world around me – the movement and the rhythm of the seasons, how someone would look and live in a variety of worlds, a variety of things.”

The stories he has told with his clothes throughout his career have had different settings but the plot remains the same. “I’m not designing clothes, I’m creating a world,” he once said. Whether it’s cowboys out on the range, an African safari or the game of polo, it’s always about wealth of the old money variety and class or, more importantly, looking like you have it.

“Ralph Lauren has kept his vision strictly focused on narratives of class,” said The New York Times in 2007, on the occasion of his 40th anniversary. “His genius, frequently noted, lies in his ability to exploit a longing most of us feel to elevate our ordinary bourgeois existence and adapt it, at least superficially, to resemble the more seductive contours of our social betters.” It’s a highly successful seduction, too. Ralph Lauren and its polo player logo are known the world over. No other American fashion designer has been as commercially successful and come close to so aptly defining American style.

Today there are more than 20 different divisions to the Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, which covers a variety of clothing for men, women and children as well as a home collection, fragrance and accessories. The company also owns the Club Monaco, Chaps and American Living labels. The apparel side of the business is divided into a dozen lines, including Purple Label for men’s evening wear and hand-tailored suiting, Black Label for women’s evening wear, RLX for ski, golf and tennis clothing, and Rugby for a more youthful buyer.

The heritage of the business, however, lies firmly in men’s apparel and it’s one of the few fashion labels to be stronger in menswear than womenswear. It was while working for the neckwear company Beau Brummell in 1967 that Lauren was given the opportunity to design his own line. The wide, colourful ties he created were the opposite of what was popular at the time but they proved successful and trend-setting. The following year he started his own company and launched a line of men’s clothing under the Polo brand.

Ralph Lauren’s first boutique store opened in Bloomingdales’ Manhattan flagship store in 1969. He launched womenswear in 1971 and opened his first freestanding store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The following year saw the launch of the now-famous knit shirt with the mallet-wielding polo player logo in 24 colours.

The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997 and Ralph Lauren is chairman and CEO of the Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation. After the company appointed Roger Farah as the chief operating officer in 2000 it accelerated its global expansion, bought back some of its licensed products and launched new businesses. The Australian and New Zealand businesses are operated under a licensing agreement with the Oroton Group. At present, 70 per cent of the company’s business comes from its US operations but Farah told Women’s Wear Daily in 2007, “We think the world will divide up into a third Europe, a third in Asia and a third in the US. So that means the international business itself could be twice as big as the US.”

“Our company, more than ever, remains steadfast to the tradition of our American heritage and values,” says Lauren in reference to the company’s global push. “But over the long term our international expansion efforts offer us the most exciting and transformational growth opportunities. An opening of a store offering a total world of Ralph Lauren on the Left Bank in Paris next month is one such example. We also believe in the potential for our brands in China, given the growing appetite for global luxury brands among Chinese consumers.”

The blurring of the line between Ralph Lauren’s personal life and the products he creates in his name has been a key to the brand’s success. “For me it was never just about the right product. What I do is about living. It’s about living the best life you can and enjoying the fullness of life around you - from what you wear to the way you live,” says Lauren. To that end, when his wife Ricky couldn’t find the sorts of clothes she wanted to wear he launched his women’s line. After he had children - two boys, Andrew and David, and a girl, Dylan - he launched a boys’ line of clothing in 1972.

David Lauren, the middle child, is the only one of his offspring to enter the family business. His sister owns the upmarket confectionary store, Dylan’s Candy Bar; his brother Andrew, an actor who appeared in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown and Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, is now a film producer with his own company, Andrew Lauren Productions.

David joined the company in 2000, specifically to launch Ralph Lauren Media and to spearhead the creation of polo.com so that his father’s vision could be brought to life on flat screens. While still a student  at Duke University, he founded, published and edited Swing, a lifestyle magazine for 20-somethings, which folded after five years. “I thought the right bridge would be to develop a media company for Ralph Lauren and to find new ways to tell interesting stories. My father gave me an amazing opportunity. I certainly work hard to prove that
I am a good investment.”

Now senior vice president of advertising, marketing and corporate communications for Polo Ralph Lauren, David Lauren’s “goal was to develop Ralph Lauren Media with websites, magazines, television …all kinds of fun ways to help the brand reach customers”. Ralph Lauren Media was initially a joint venture with NBC-Lauren Media Holdings and ValueVision Media Inc. Polo paid $US175 million to take full ownership of RLM in early 2007.

“Ralph Lauren doesn’t just create a tie or a shirt or a suit or a gown, he is creating a story with each outfit,” says David. “We then create environments and context around the clothing to help tell those stories. And that’s what our stores do and that’s what our advertising does. They’re movies. Walking into a store is like you’re walking into the set of a movie. If you’re flicking through a magazine and you’re looking at 10 pages of Ralph Lauren advertising then you are being enveloped into a world where you not only want the clothing, you want the car, the house, the dog, you want every part of that world.” And those stories, artificial worlds that customers long to inhabit, are key to the brand’s success.

Lauren’s interest in clothes and dressing up began at an early age. “I was always inspired by those kind of prep-school people and their clothes,” he told The New York Times. “By classic things, by the way those people looked and dressed. Maybe because I didn’t have it, I always reached for it.”

“America has always been the place where dreams can come true,” Lauren says. “It is about the freedom of creating a better life for yourself and your family.” In many ways only America could have produced a fashion brand like Ralph Lauren but  even America is unlikely to produce another designer who will have such phenomenal reach. In her review of Lauren’s 40th anniversary show, Cathy Horyn wrote in The New York Times that there “has been a shift in perspective in the past few years as stores and magazines seemingly burn through new names in the business. The same is true of the music and film industries. The process inevitably anoints the superficial.” How many other, younger designers, she wondered, would ever achieve as much as Ralph Lauren?

History of Ralph Lauren
The Ralph Lauren business was founded in 1967 with a line of wide neckties.
In 1969, the company opened its first store, a menswear boutique inside Bloomingdales in Manhattan.
Womenswear was added to the business in 1971; homewares followed in 1983.
In 1973, Lauren designed costumes for the film The Great Gatsby and in 1978 for Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, a film that influenced the way millions dressed.
In 1986, the company opened its mothership on Madison Avenue in the Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo Mansion, a massive French Renaissance Revival pile built in 1898.
Polo Ralph Lauren was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997.