Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulates designer Ralph Lauren on receiving the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
The American Dream, with all its promise, may have gotten threadbare and worn around the edges — trampled by a bad economy, bruised by excoriating public discourse — but it still has the power to bring one of its most public champions to tears.
Designer Ralph Lauren’s climb to the top of the fashion industry began in 1967 with a few fistfuls of ties and continued into a billion-dollar success firmly rooted in his perfectly crafted fantasy of country cottages and antique-filled boardrooms, the expansive West and the Gatsby-esque East, sailboats and roadsters.
No other fashion firm has been as adept at defining the American Dream in images of luxurious fabric, discreet hemlines and painterly hues.
On Tuesday morning, Lauren was in Washington, dressed in a banker’s navy pinstriped suit with a crisp white shirt and slim navy tie with tiny white polka dots. He was at the National Museum of American History — surrounded by his two siblings; his three children; his wife, Ricky; and a battalion of his company’s executives — to receive the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for his patriotism, entrepreneurship and philanthropy.
The ceremony was punctuated by a multitude of flags, glossy stories about what it means to be an American, bluegrass music and unfettered idealism. But all that sugary symbolism was made bracingly real by the accompanying naturalization of 15 American citizens each representing a different country from Australia to Sierra Leone.
If there was any literate soul unaware that his company, Polo Ralph Lauren, was one steeped in the mythology of Americana, that connection was made plain in 1998. Back then, Lauren — a diminutive gentleman in a posh but restrained suit — had stood in this same atrium, alongside first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge his donation of $13 million to save the Star-Spangled Banner. The flag, measuring 30-by-42 feet, originally flew over Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired the national anthem. It had been on near continuous display for 91 years, eventually hanging in the Museum of American History, where it had fallen into extreme disrepair. Lauren’s gift to restore it, part of Clinton’s “Save America’s Treasures” campaign, was — at the time — the largest corporate donation ever made to the Smithsonian Institution. A plaque at the entrance to the flag’s gallery commemorates his gift, which was as much about the country as it was about his highly personal aesthetics.
“The flag is my country,” Lauren said Tuesday. “A lot of American [designers] were looking to Europe for inspiration. I was looking for it in America. I was looking in the West, the Adirondacks. I know what it is to see the Rocky Mountains. Every country has their beautiful things. But I knew this country.”
Sixteen years later, Lauren was back on stage alongside Clinton, a singular figure dressed in head-to-toe cobalt blue, who recalled that earlier gift and celebrated Lauren’s vision.
Before accepting his award, Lauren watched as the group of new citizens took the Oath of Allegiance. And when they finished, they quietly cheered and waved tiny American flags. Lauren stood in a receiving line to greet them, one that included Jeh Charles Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, who had administered the oath; Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; and Clinton — who was being trailed by a watchful, Twitter-twitchy press retinue. The new citizens were presented with certificates of naturalization from Johnson. Clinton handed out hearty handshakes. And Lauren provided the crowd of about 100 with gift bags, which included a Star-Spangled Banner commemorative baseball cap (with the embroidered inscription: Generously Supported by Ralph Lauren). America loves a little swag.
It was the story of those immigrants, their striving — and how it mirrored Lauren’s own story — that brought tears to his eyes. “It was emotional,” Lauren said after the ceremony. The night before, he’d gone with his family to the Lincoln Memorial. He’d awakened Tuesday morning at his hotel and he’d seen the White House across the street and an American flag blowing. And then, on stage at the museum, he was reminded of his own immigrant parents, who had come from Belarus. He remembered watching his mother prepare to take her own citizenship test. “When you have people talking about the flag and America and you hear immigrants planning a new life, I was touched,” he said. “I know what that was like.”
For almost 50 years, Lauren’s business plan has focused on selling his vision of the American Dream, his fantasy of the good life and of what it means to be wealthy and not merely rich. It has been a steady success. When his company went pubic in 1997, Polo’s stock traded at $26 a share, as of Tuesday afternoon, it was at $155. Lauren succeeded with an unwavering vision that has made his company a marvel of longevity. It has been nicked by the occasional bit of bad press — such as when critics accused him of creating a rarified world that was unwelcoming to minorities or of excessively Photoshopped female perfection. His collections have sometimes been reviewed poorly in the fashion press. But Lauren perseveres, secure in the knowledge that what he’s selling has nothing to with trends, fashion or, really, even something as mundane as the seasonal shift in clothes. And people not only embrace it, they aspire to it.
“I always had this dream as a little child. I’d see [advertisements in] magazines with cowboys and the Wild West and the big cities. I started thinking about what I wanted,” said Thomas Wolf, 30, who was born in northern Italy and became an American citizen Tuesday. “I read this story about Ralph Lauren in Vanity Fair and him coming out of the Bronx and being what he is now. Everyone’s not going to be a multimillionaire, but you can come here and raise a family, buy a house and get a good job.”
Lauren’s aesthetic has been defined by five essential tropes: sailing, equestrians, cowboys, flappers and safaris. And over the decades he has rarely strayed from them. He has “freshened” his sensibility, notes Amy Shea, a New York-based fashion industry consultant specializing in luxury branding and storytelling. But he has never changed it. His clothes aren’t so much ground-breaking as they are reassuring. In the capable hands of Lauren, the American Dream remains the same as it has always been.
Lauren’s company is the purest example of lifestyle dressing — a term that has become so overused and misused that it has been rendered practically meaningless. Every designer looking to build a business talks about being a lifestyle brand when what they really mean is they plan on selling everything from business suits to bikinis, and maybe getting a lucrative license for bedding.
“He believes in offering what he calls ‘the dream’ to all different kinds of people and at different incomes,” said Robert Burke, a retail consultant who worked at Polo from 1988 to 1999. “If you’re shopping at Macy’s, you want an experience just as much as if you’re in one of his own stores.”
Lauren sells an experience. He loves to present his sportswear and his evening clothes in action or in context, not just free-floating against a minimalist backdrop. He packages them in a way that allows both loyal customers and potential ones to glimpse the rarefied life into which those products seamlessly fit. This sort of “emotional branding,” Shea says, doesn’t focus on a singular handbag or a certain pair of shoes. It emphasizes the murky, hard-to-describe idea of what it feels like to own those products. Lauren’s work captures our communal yearning to peer over all those ivy-covered fieldstone walls.
“He’s talking about life and what it feels like to live a certain way,” Shea said. “It took fashion brands a long time to realize they were selling an experience.”
Lauren led the way.
Robin Givhan is a fashion critic and writer, covering fashion as a business, as a cultural institution and as pure pleasure.
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