“Plainly,” wrote Brendan Gill in The New Yorker, “great numbers of people share Lauren’s fantasies, including the supreme fantasy of believing that a change in clothing or a change in interior decoration can produce equivalent changes in personality.”

His reach into womenswear began when he started making clothes for his wife, Ricky, for whom he wanted to adapt a men’s jacket and shirt. That led to a collection of shirts for women . . . and, after a few decades, a nearly $13 billion brand that is synonymous, for millions of customers who want to buy in, with the tailored taste of old-money Americans.

When asked about his earliest inspirations, Lauren consistently cites films he saw as a kid, and stars like Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. "When I was growing up I used to go to a lot of movies. And when I came out of the movie,” he once said, “I wanted to be Robin Hood. I wanted to be Mickey Mantle. I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio. I wanted to be Zorro. I loved the idea of being able to go and see a character and see the people living, that's what inspires me."

Spin-off collections include activewear, home furnishings, shoes, children’s clothing, and fragrances. Like a number of other designers in the early to mid-2000s, he pushed his dominance of his niche even further by licensing his name to mass retailers—in his case, Kohl’s and J.C. Penney, thus making his personal fortune even more Gatsbyesque.

Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz in 1939, in the Bronx, New York, to poor Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Belarus. He has described himself as a scrappy kid who reached a height of only five feet six inches but played basketball anyway, who wanted to be an actor but worried he didn’t have the looks. His will toward self-determination is said to have been informed by a youthful reading of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Over the years, Lauren has focused his collections on themes that serve as a visual document of iconic cultural—and mostly American—moments in time: the Santa Fe collection (with its Navajo-blanket motifs), the Amelia Earhart collection, the Folk Art collection. . . . And his ad campaigns have been just as emblematic. Working with top fashion photographers including Bruce Weber, he has created patriotic images that are generally lush, beautiful, and extremely effective. In the earlier years, Lauren put a human face—his own, as well as, later, other fine-featured, well-groomed ones—to his brand, selling clothes by selling a lifestyle concept.

Mirroring in real life the aspirational image his brand so vividly promotes, Ralph Lauren’s story is the story of the American dream. A tale of ambition and self-invention, its hero has often been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—a character, not coincidentally polo ralph lauren mens shirts, that Lauren clothed for the 1974 movie The Great Gatsby Ralph Lauren Outlet. His oeuvre, and the lifestyle tableau he has created, were born in part from the silver-lined-cloud realm of old Hollywood, a fantasy of a nation in which wishes always come true. “The genius of Lauren,” as GQ once noted, “is that he realized every man is a movie star and a maverick,” and that “you can be both.” And he is.

“What makes Lauren different from every other Jew with WASP fantasies is how completely he saw Waspdom in visual terms,” Paul Goldberger wrote in 2007, “and how determined he was to design every bit of it, down to the last detail, and then make a living selling his fantasies to others.”

His design signatures are more instantly and automatically recognizable than those of almost any other designer working today: classic, tailored, dashing, tweed-to-lamé looks that remind us of English aristocrats or New England blue bloods weekending in the country. Influenced by the style Lauren himself aspired to, his motifs are one part Western cowboy, one part lord and lady of the manor, and one part Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey Polo Ralph Lauren Men's Shortsleeve.

After dropping out of college, he changed his last name to the more nouveau American–sounding Lauren—pronounced with an accent on the first syllable, like the Lauren in Lauren Hutton, not on the second syllable—and made his start in the menswear business. From the beginning, his collections have been based on good, wearable high-quality basics that everyone needs to keep stocked in their closet: smartly cut blazers, cashmere crewnecks, leather jackets, and oxford shirts. “When I started 40 years ago, I made all the things I couldn’t find,” he told GQ in 2007. “I was looking for the unusual pieces that were preppy and had a heritage, but that no one made anymore.”

Along with his family—who are quite public representatives of the Lauren brand, being photographed frequently for magazine features—he appears to be living the upper-crust life he has so long marketed. Ralph and Ricky Lauren have homes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (where they’ve raised their three children, David, Dylan, and Andrew) and Bedford, New York, a ranch in Telluride, Colorado, and beach houses in Jamaica. He also has a collection of vintage cars that has been exhibited in Paris. Meanwhile, he has shared his wealth, contributing millions of dollars and countless hours to the fight against breast cancer.

上一篇： Burberry Polo Shirts chopstick actual exercises as well as they have an endearin 下一篇： Designers Guild - Fabrics & Wallpaper Collections, Furniture, Bed and Bath,