Ralph Lauren's Polo Shirt Turns 50 — It Once Told a Generation's American Dream Through Fashion | QDaily Business History

But that generation has grown old.

At Ralph Lauren's 50th-anniversary show, Oprah Winfrey rose to give a toast and spelled out what the brand has meant to American culture: "For fifty years, you have designed our dreams, inspired our ambitions, created a sense of value that radiates the glamour of health and goodness... Your clothes have told the story of our lives, the lives we long for today and in the future."

The show, held on September 8, would become the loudest event of that season's New York Fashion Week, and no one doubted it. The setting was the ornate Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, where the courtyard had been fitted with 17 giant LED screens cycling through the designer's most memorable collections. At the dinner afterward the tables were loaded with champagne, and the steak came from Lauren's own ranch in Colorado.

Ralph Lauren, 78 this year, once listed one of his goals in his high school yearbook: "To become a millionaire." That drive, plus an innate gift for romance, pushed him to launch his first menswear collection in 1968 — the Polo line that became his signature.

The anniversary show seated 500 guests, and the roll call of fashion, media, retail and political names may never be assembled again: Hillary Clinton in pale blue silk, bodyguards on either side; the fifth James Bond, Pierce Brosnan, next to Oprah; Robert De Niro and Steven Spielberg not far off, along with Anne Hathaway and the newly engaged Nick Jonas and his fiancée. Every American fashion house seemed to have sent its designer — Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Donna Karan, Thom Browne — some of them apprentices of the elder Ralph Lauren in their day, and some of them newcomers to the business, like the rapper Kanye West.

Every one of them was a model of American success, without exception. They traded stories of the shining moments in their lives when they wore Ralph Lauren: Ellis Ross wore one of the brand's couture gowns to her "first Emmy nomination"; Tommy Hilfiger, the 67-year-old American designer, said that before he started his own label he loved wearing Polo Ralph Lauren polo shirts.

"When I first moved to Chicago and I was making enough to pay the rent, the gas and the electric bill, with a little left over, I thought I had made it." Oprah raised her glass and told this story from her days as a young reporter. "To celebrate that success I didn't buy a fancy car or jewelry — I did that later — I went out and bought a Ralph Lauren towel. Not just a towel: Ralph Lauren sheets too!"

What Ralph Lauren sells Americans is exactly that — the hunger for success.

Unlike his European counterparts across the Atlantic, Ralph Lauren built a clothing empire across 80 countries on a wholly American set of values. He could show aristocratic luxury and also cut rough, practical clothes. Over half a century of clothing and advertising he borrowed the lives of people far outside most people's reach — Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Wall Street bankers, Rocky Mountain ranchers, Western cowboys — and sold that way of living to a middle class that has never played polo.

And the elder Ralph Lauren himself, eyes wet at the show as he shook hands with one famous friend after another, is the American Dream made flesh.

Before he became Ralph Lauren, the Forbes billionaire worth $7.1 billion, his name was Ralph Lipschitz, youngest son of a Jewish immigrant family in the Bronx. After years of classmates mocking his surname, he decided to change it to Lauren. "Growing up in the Bronx, I saw the world through a pane of glass — not the window facing the school basketball court, but the one in my dreams."

Growing up, Ralph escaped his family's poverty inside the plots the movies wove. It was Hollywood's golden age, and from it he took the ability to walk into a fantasy. "Ralph projected himself into scenes with people like Cary Grant and Gary Cooper," said Michael Gross, author of Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren.

He once said: "Every time I design a piece of clothing, I'm making a movie." Calling Ralph a fashion designer isn't quite right — he never trained as one — but, as he put it, "I don't need a focus group to know what people want. I can feel it." That may be why he could design the whole wardrobe for the 1974 film The Great Gatsby without apparent effort. Self-made, in love with glamour, in pursuit of money: what he saw in Gatsby was himself.

Starting with men's neckties, Ralph Lauren drew the life he dreamed of roughly one item at a time.

After high school and two years in the army, Ralph came back to New York and took a job selling ties at the upscale menswear store Brooks Brothers. The ties of the day, he noticed, were all the same: narrow, plain, striped. He decided to make a men's tie twice as wide and brightly colored, and to charge twice as much. That radical design, born in a desk drawer in the Empire State Building, won Ralph Lauren a first order of 1,200 ties from Neiman Marcus. The wide ties sold better and better across New York, and even Bloomingdale's — which had first told Ralph to drop his own name and sell under a store label — had to come back and order them.

In 1967, at 27, Ralph Lauren opened a tie shop called "Polo." In a 1983 interview with The Times he said he chose the name because he had a vague sense that Polo carried an air of "Englishness."

The next year the Polo brand launched a menswear collection. "The Brooks Brothers experience mattered to me. I worked there at 24, and their clothes were boring," Ralph said in a 2002 interview with Oprah. One day he stepped out of the store and saw the film star Douglas Fairbanks Jr., then 50, in a double-breasted suit and a spread-collar shirt, and the sight moved him. "You couldn't find clothes like that then. Everyone wore the same button-down shirts and narrow ties, and I wanted spread collars, wide ties, fitted suits — so I made them, one piece at a time."

With the Polo name in hand, Ralph's 1972 run of polo shirts in 24 colors went ahead and printed the polo rider on the chest. It became the brand's most famous mark.

Ralph Lauren did not invent the polo shirt. But next to the discreet crocodile of the French brand Lacoste, the polo rider was a far blunter "hint" at an English aristocratic sport — and to the ear, "polo shirt" sounds friendlier than "tennis shirt." Perhaps that too is because polo itself sits so far from ordinary life that the distance becomes a pleasure.

Through the 1970s the polo shirt became standard issue for Ivy League prep school students, and Ralph Lauren built a full wardrobe for these young people at private schools. He came to be seen as the model of preppy style.

The style had been popular since World War I, reflecting how upper-class New England society spent its leisure: polo, yachting, tennis, hunting. The larger middle class that the postwar boom created later copied it. Ralph Lauren caught hold of that and insisted his clothing was a "Style," not a "Fashion."

At the same time American department stores were at their height, which pushed Ralph Lauren further out — from an exclusive counter at Bloomingdale's in Manhattan into more and more stores. At an internal merchandising meeting in the 1970s, a Sears executive described their target customer bluntly: "Focus on American middle-class families who own their homes. We serve neither hippies nor the rich. We don't live off discounts, and we don't lead trends. We simply reflect, faithfully, every desire, worry, problem and folly of the American middle class."

That summary of the life the American middle class imagines for itself became the thinking behind Ralph Lauren's later sub-brands and marketing — from tennis to golf, from the ottomans in the Ralph Lauren Home collection to the bright red cowboy boots in Polo Western, without exception. In today's fashionable phrase, Ralph Lauren slowly turned into a "lifestyle brand" that does a bit of everything, selling clothing, accessories and home goods. Along the way some weak sub-brands were cut, such as Ralph Lauren Rugby, built around rugby shirts.

A strong cultural backdrop was the ground Ralph Lauren's success stood on, and its collapse has happened where no one was looking. Golf, with its air of dated vanity, has become a game few people play, and young shoppers do not carry as sharp a memory of the aristocratic class behind polo as their parents did. The white elite image that Ivy League preppy style stood for is now being replaced by more varied voices. In America today, more than $5 billion in defaulted student loans leaves the new middle class feeling pressure rather than plain fantasy.

What Ralph Lauren missed was an entirely new cultural phenomenon that began in the 1990s. The brand's own account of the teddy bear that appears so often on Polo Ralph Lauren clothing runs like this — "both innocent and worldly, refined and endearing" — and yet that bear strangely became one of the coolest images in hip-hop.

In Brooklyn, New York, in 1988, a Black gang called the Lo Lifes appeared, and stealing Polo Ralph Lauren — the high-end leisure brand of white people — from department stores was their daily work. The brazen shoplifting made the Lo Lifes famous (Lo comes from the second syllable of Polo, and sounds like "Low"), and the Polo they collected grew into enough to arm themselves head to foot across Brooklyn. It was the exact opposite of what Ralph Lauren had in mind when he designed the clothes: Black wearers used the Polo bear to challenge the walls of class and race.

As hip-hop became mainstream in American society, more and more big-name rappers reached back to the gang culture of the 1990s. When Kanye West shot the cover of his first album in 2004, he wore a Polo Bear sweater.

This blindness to varied subcultures may be a common failing of American fashion brands. Ashley Petrie, merchandising director at the clothing chain Fred Segal, said: "American fashion doesn't lack breakthroughs, but it sometimes lacks a strong message of identity."

"When we talk about the state of American fashion today, what we are really talking about is 'world' fashion," Ralph Lauren told WWD. "Pushed and shared through the internet, fashion has become democratized and globalized, bombarding consumers of every class." It is not only Ralph Lauren. Calvin Klein, Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger have long been able to make and sell anything from underwear to evening gowns, and to cover the high-end Bergdorf Goodman and the discounter TJ Maxx at the same time. But under today's global competition from fast fashion and e-commerce, what once made them different has turned into sameness.

Europe's old fashion houses are used to controlling their own retail. Most American fashion brands are multibillion-dollar businesses that lean on wholesale. The department store boom once made growth easy for them. Now the slump has arrived.

The three big chains — Macy's, Nordstrom and Kohl's — have been falling overall since 2015, and discounted clothing has hit the brands hard.

A shopper who drives 45 minutes from Chicago to a Nordstrom Rack said in a recent interview that she can spend three or four hours there digging for a Ralph Lauren black velvet robe that costs $100 at full price and $15 on sale.

The collapsing share price forced the elder Ralph Lauren to step down as CEO in 2015. His replacement was Stefan Larsson, global president of Gap's Old Navy, but Larsson's plan to remake the brand along fast-fashion lines drew hard resistance from the company's leadership, and in under a year and a half he was gone. In April 2017 the brand said it would close the Polo flagship on Fifth Avenue in New York, beginning a retreat from its channels and a restructuring of the business.

Under Patrice Louvet, the new CEO who came from Procter & Gamble, Ralph Lauren appears to have climbed out of the mud over the past few quarters, mostly because the company shut 25% of its American department store distribution points and 31 directly operated stores in fiscal 2018. It also plans to spend $100 million more on marketing over the next five years. Arriving right behind Stefan Larsson was the group's first chief marketing officer, Jonathan Bottomley, hired away from Burberry after two strong years of digital work there. Bottomley built a new tiered marketing strategy for the brand, leaning harder on Instagram, WeChat and other new media to carry an American brand's values.

Still, even though a leaner structure and fewer discounts have won back the share price, the company's revenue of $6.2 billion in its latest fiscal year was nearly $1 billion below the $7.4 billion of two years earlier.

For a fashion brand, pleasing investors by cutting is not quite the same thing as winning back a new generation of young shoppers.

At a New York Fashion Week already crowded in the name of "democracy," Ralph Lauren's 50th-anniversary show put the brand's women's ready-to-wear, Purple Label menswear, Double RL menswear and several children's sub-brands and collections on the runway at once.

It was the first time Ralph Lauren had done that, hoping to bring back the complete picture of the American family the brand offered at its peak in the 1980s and '90s. More important, it was meant to send a signal: that Ralph Lauren had not missed the more varied, newer America of the present.

Set to nostalgic songs like New York Is My Home and Home Coming, the part of the show that stayed with you was still the colorful Polo collection, full of street energy. It looked like a late reply to the hip-hop community that has loved the brand for years.

"I think the lifestyle we have is much bigger than a tie, a shirt or a pair of jeans. This will be the start of the next 50 years." Ralph Lauren, as chairman of the board, said this to shareholders at the annual meeting in August. Whose 50 years those will be, no one yet knows.

Graphics: Zheng Shuya

Cover image: Ralph Lauren