Having mixed feelings about return to office? Not sure what to wear? Ralph Lauren has a solution for that.
On Monday night paparazzi were camped out in front of the nondescript glass-door building at Madison Avenue and 58th Street where Mr. Lauren has his storied headquarters, there to record the arrivals of Jessica Chastain, Kerry Washington and Glenn Close, among others. The reason: Mr. Lauren’s latest … well, not show, exactly. More like episode in the long-running series he has been directing called “This Is My Life.”
For the last few years (even before Covid), Mr. Lauren has been framing his collections as glimpses into his private world. There was, for example, the 2017 show held in the garage in Bedford, N.Y., where he keeps his collection of rare cars, including a 1938 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic once valued at $40 million. After the pandemic lockdowns had lifted, there was the show held in a room that had been conceived as a doppelgänger of his own Fifth Avenue living room, down to the bowls of multicolored M&Ms and the faux view over Central Park. There was the last show, which recreated his ranch in Colorado, including the wood beams and active fireplaces.
And now he was throwing open the doors of his mahogany-paneled, art-bedecked place of work, the better to display his fall women’s wear line.
It’s both an incredibly generous act and a deeply narcissistic one. Not to mention a meta-narrative about a designer who dreamed of mythic worlds — the pioneer West, the Stork Club, the Morgan manse — and created the clothes for them, and then those clothes sold so well that he could actually build the dream worlds for himself and invite everyone in. The promise implicit in the experience being, of course, that if you buy the outfits, the rest may follow. Goals!
“These are the chairs we all have in our offices,” one executive whispered, gesturing to the leather and chrome seating in the show space as tux-clad waiters circled toting Champagne. The leather of the chairs, a sort of burnished brown, even had a special name, the executive said: RL Gold. As it happens, Mr. Lauren’s first show was also held in his then-office, in 1972. It was a full circle moment, a reminder of how far the boy from the Bronx had come and how consistent his values.
Those values are also, natch, most visible in the clothes (and underscored by the fact that the once-and-future supermodel Christy Turlington opened the show). This time around, that meant a romp through the fields of greige in monochrome cashmere, wool and silk, with the occasional sparkling bias-cut slip dress slinking through, like a shower of gold swaddled in the warmth of a chunky cardigan. There were swishy trousers and plush overcoats, neckties mixed up with cowboy hats, a bit of fringe and the occasional beat-up leather. Think of it as comfort suiting de luxe or power-leisure, a security blanket of executive plushiness, complete with matching handbags.
Afterward, Mr. Lauren invited everyone to dinner at the Polo Bar, his paradise of clubby dining. That included the models, who arrived after the show without changing their clothes. (“I hope nobody spills,” said David Lauren, one of the designer’s three children and the company’s chief branding and innovation officer.) Framed by the walls of ancestral — or ancestral-effect — oil portraits and equestrian scenes, in a room redolent of pastrami amuse-bouches and the scent of deal-making, the runway looks were entirely at home.
