The Polo effect

Photo | The Rake

Ralph Lauren and dream-making 

When watching HBO’s recently released Very Ralph, a documentary which chronicles the genesis and triumph of the Ralph Lauren brand, one is bombarded with image after image of fields and farms. In these landscapes are beautiful people, rural and homely, and they are adorned in denim and flannel. In one photograph, children are chasing one another; in the next, they are laying serenely in the grass. It is these things and these landscapes—Colorado, Montauk, cabins, and mountains—that Lauren himself is most inspired by, and they signify, as noted in the film, a kind of anti-fashion.   

The sight of a Ralph Lauren advertisement brings to mind the work of the great American photographer Ansel Adams, famed for his images of the American West. There is a quality to Adams’ photographs, where for a split second they look like paintings, glorious and pristine. But I know that they are photographs and that their surreal quality is in part due to the fact that I have never seen his subjects—Yosemite, High Sierra, New Mexico—in person. 

Ralph Lauren advertisements have this same majestic quality, but less for reasons of naturalism or grandeur than for the potency of the Ralph Lauren image. 

In a Ralph Lauren Country ad, there is a photograph of a white barn. It is a still photograph, and the landscape is empty—no models, no clothing. As this image is displayed on the screen, a voice declares that so strong is this photo that it makes one “want to live in that barn,” and thus, a customer is never “just buying an article of clothing but joining a narrative.” 

One of the first things I bought with my own money was a pair of beautiful, oxblood Ralph Lauren gloves as a gift for my mother. I do think that they’re beautiful, just as I think that the white barn is beautiful, but I’m wary about the sort of narrative the Ralph Lauren brand embraces. 

Lauren admits that his brand is centered around great American stories. In the film, memories of his childhood are detailed with anecdotes on cinema, and he cites leading man Cary Grant as his hero. Clips from My Darling Clementine and other Western films are included in the reel, and the very origin of Ralph Lauren’s brand owes to the influence of film on his life. His ties, the very first garment sold under his name, stood out due to their wideness, and Lauren adds that they were made wide in the first place because that was the style that he had seen on screen. 

Much of the film perpetuates the idea that Lauren’s true love is film. Interviewees comment on his “cinematic mind,” and it is noted that if Lauren hadn’t gone into fashion, he surely would have become a film producer. His skills are most evident when regarding the lifestyle image he has created. His brand is not about revealing a beautiful landscape, but is more about creating a character to live within it. 

Lauren describes his early obsession with a white dinner jacket, one that he says he “saw in the movies but didn’t see in the stores.” His daughter notes that once he puts on this dinner jacket, he becomes Frank Sinatra and when they dance, they are Fred and Ginger. 

The Ralph Lauren brand is about playing a part and dressing for it, and whether that be a cowboy or film star, the brand’s ethos is concerned with projection. The critic Judith Thurman notes that the brand is “performance art in which you can participate,” but the Ralph Lauren image falls short when one realizes that it is not about a simple life—it is about an easy one. 

On Polo, the best-known Ralph Lauren product line, Thurman notes that its namesake, the sport, is “the most exclusive, kingly sport there is”; it “requires you to own horses and to know how to ride them.” Despite all of the Spaghetti Westerns and cowboy paraphernalia the film has referenced, Ralph Lauren isn’t about cowboys at all, but about equestrianism, and those are two very different things. 

Polo is about hobbies and holidays, two things I can’t imagine cowboys do. 

I had wondered in my viewing of the film whether Lauren could see the contradiction at hand. When it is noted, in the film, that Ralph “has always loved contradiction,” I held my breath. “…Putting Naomi Campbell in a slinky gold dress and throwing a safari jacket over her shoulders.” I remember that I am watching a fashion documentary. 

The fashion designer Jason Wu notes that the Polo shirt is what Americana was to him as an immigrant. The allure of the Ralph Lauren brand is that it represents what one would like to be, a caricature of a very particular kind of American life. The truth is that the Polo will always be sold for the simple fact that it is easier to buy a shirt than a lifestyle. 

 So even Lauren’s clothes are costumes of a sort. His photographs, unlike the photographs of Ansel Adams, are advertisements and sets, and the people in them are models. And those are certainly not their clothes. 

Richard Cohen’s “POLO-rizing America” considers Lauren’s WASP-y American dream. Cohen writes that the movies opened a window to a world that Ralph did not grow up with, and that his clothes do the same for others. 

The problem here is regarding the aspirational. The Ralph Lauren advertisements. The beautiful, white barn for instance, is not someone’s home, it is someone’s vacation home. It is noted in the film that Lauren dresses according to which one of his many cars he will be driving on a given day. He is also the owner of a ranch where there may be a white barn like the one in his famed ad, but what is important is that this ranch is only one of his many properties. What we don’t see in a Ralph Lauren advertisement is the fact that these simple pleasures are afforded by success. These simple pleasures are actually things of financial luxury. 

The mythology of the Ralph Lauren image is that anyone can enter this life of holiday, but the truth is that these understated things are really things of luxury, that the timeless is only timeless because it is preserved by money. His natural landscapes are in reality carefully curated, and his lifestyle is a lifestyle fantasy. These simple (marketable) pleasures are only afforded by the kind of success that Lauren himself has had. What is aspiration without attainability? 

Shape

Naomi Fry notes, quite perfectly, in The New Yorker: “This is a world of ease and abundance, which never reveals the pains taken in its creation.” There is no doubt that people want for the world to be comfortable, but there is something unsettling about a brand that plays a balancing act between wealth on the one hand and leisure on the other. As far as marketing goes, Ralph Lauren has always been a brand of nonchalance, of shrugging at one’s wealth, of displaying those things that are elusive. 

This sentiment is touched on towards the end of the film, but only briefly. New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman notes that Ralph Lauren “is not a brand that rewrites.” Lauren has offered, from the very beginning, a reliably traditional, Ivy League-inspired aesthetic, and the brand’s identity has never strayed. 

Ralph Lauren is in the business of imagining a beautiful life. I don’t know that there is anything wrong with this. His images are rather easy to love. I’ve spent years loving these things; tennis and clothes, gardens and big dogs, all desirable. And my favourite photograph happens to be an advertisement with Joan Didion in large sunglasses for Céline. I have also loved, equally, the work of fashion writers such as Robin Givhan, Vanessa Friedman, and Judith Thurman (all of whom, to my delight, are featured in the documentary). They’re critics, but I know somehow that they are a part of this Ralph Lauren world. 

What I am most unsure about is whether America remains, or ever was, what Lauren presents it to be. Ralph Lauren—the man, the brand—may also believe in this dream, and its simplicity, more than I do.  

Comments are closed.