Ralph Lauren’s All-American Style, From Polo Upstart to National Icon
A kid from the Bronx once pressed his face to a department-store window, memorizing how Fred Astaire knotted a tie and how Cary Grant wore tweed. That kid was Ralph Lifshitz, born in October 1939 to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Belarus, and the world he could only watch through glass became the one he sold to everyone else. He changed his surname to Lauren at 16. In 1967, a necktie salesman with no design schooling persuaded tie manufacturer Beau Brummell to let him cut his own neckwear—wide, opulent, four inches across when the era wanted skinny—and christened the line Polo, a sport he had never played. Bloomingdale’s bit. A menswear collection followed in 1968 on the strength of a $50,000 loan from Manhattan clothier Norman Hilton, then the mesh Polo shirt with its embroidered pony in 1972, and an empire took shape on a single idea: that American style could be invented, then exported.
What Lauren built was a fantasy of belonging—preppy Ivy, English country gentry, Old Hollywood glamour and the open range, all filtered through an outsider’s longing. Where Halston chased disco modernism and Calvin Klein stripped sportswear to sex and minimalism, Lauren sold heritage that never quite existed; Tommy Hilfiger later borrowed the blueprint at a younger price. He clothed Robert Redford’s Gatsby in 1974 and put his menswear into Diane Keaton‘s Annie Hall in 1977. He turned the runway into a full-on spectacle, capped by the 50th-anniversary show at Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace in September 2018.
His vocabulary is instantly legible: the navy gold-button blazer, cable-knit and American-flag hand-knits, patchwork madras, bandanas and Western fringe, the cricket sweater, worn denim. He outfits Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and Team USA’s Olympians. In January 2025, President Biden gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the boy at the window, now the dream itself. America turns 250 this year, and the look the country claims as its own came from one Bronx kid—clearest of all in how he dressed himself, decade after decade.
