Iconic POLO visionary at the 2008 CFDA Awards
Date of Birth
10/14/1939 (68 years old)
Place of Birth
Bronx, NY
High School
DeWitt Clinton High School
Neighborhood
Upper East Side
Other Residences
Bedford, NY
Jamaica
Montauk, NY
Ridgway, CO
Who
The world's wealthiest fashion designer, Ralph Lauren has made billions marketing a mythical lifestyle of polo matches and country clubs to the masses. His daughter is Dylan Lauren. One of his sons is David Lauren.
Backstory
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants—his father, Frank, painted houses for a living—Ralph Lifshitz was born and raised in a four-room Bronx apartment overlooking the Mosholu Parkway. "Ralphie" struggled with a lazy eye and a lisp as a young yeshiva student, but came into his own when he transferred to a public high school, where he first demonstrated a flair for fashion, saving up his money to buy stylish suits and suede shoes. At 17, he and his brother decided to change their last name to "Lauren "—the runner-up was "London"—and a year later Ralph headed off to City College, much to the disappointment of his mother who hoped he'd become a rabbi. He ended up dropping out though, and took a sales assistant job at Brooks Brothers before going into the army. (He didn't have to travel far: He served as a supply clerk in the Bronx.)
Lauren's design ambitions first manifested themselves when he worked as a tie salesman at a company called A. Rivetz in the mid-1960s: Convinced that he had a better sense for the varieties of ties people wanted to buy, he borrowed money from clothing manufacturer Norman Hilton and established Polo Fashions Inc. in 1968. Lauren made his first splash with a line of "wide" ties and soon followed up with a collection of polo shirts. Within a few years he'd established a thriving business and by the 1980s, he'd emerged as one of the country's most prominent designers. One of the first to establish a flagship on Rodeo Drive and feature himself—and his (pretend) lifestyle—in ad campaigns, he was also one of the first fashion designers to branch out into accessories and fragrances. His coronation was confirmed in 1986 when he appeared on the cover of Time, the same year he set a new standard for high-end retailing with his renovation of the landmark Rhinelander mansion on Madison Avenue, which reportedly cost a staggering $30 million.
The late 1980s were good to Lauren as practically every other American wore his signature preppy threads, slept under his sheets or used one of his fragrances. Although the brand suffered through a rough stretch in the early 1990s as the competition heated up, Lauren endured thanks to his many licenses and the dozens of low-cost lines sold at outlets, a concept he pioneered in the 1980s. He earned billionaire status shortly after his company, Polo Ralph Lauren, went public in 1997.
Of note
Possibly the fashion industry's greatest self-inventor—he named his company "Polo" despite the fact he had never played the game and didn't know how to ride a horse—Lauren's pivotal realization was that he wasn't actually selling clothing. He was selling a lifestyle, and the enticing illusion of sophistication, class and taste. Indeed, his extraordinary marketing skills, rather than his talent as a designer, grew his empire; much to his annoyance, his clothes have never been held in high esteem by fashion snobs. But as a "master of marketing make-believe," he's second to none. He was one of the first to figure out how to sell up ($5,000 suits) and down ($15 t-shirts made in China) the apparel food chain—and no one's done it more successfully.
Today Lauren oversees a sprawling collection of brands, sub-brands and more than three dozen licensees, which allow him to target the consumer at every price point, from the high-end Blue and Purple Label to the vintage-style Double RL to sportier lines like Polo and Polo Sport RLX, to paint to pumps to picture frames. All in, it's a $4.5 billion-a-year business comprising 150 stores and 16,000 employees, who labor to uphold Lauren's vision of classic, timeless Americana.
Keeping score
Lauren is worth $4.2 billion according to Forbes.
In person
Lauren has always been an intensely private person and much more focused on work than cavorting at fashion industry parties. His demeanor at the office has earned him the reputation as an exceedingly tough boss and micromanager, obsessed with portraying the Lauren brand in just the right light. His fixation with portraying the perfect all-American aesthetic is a great irony, of course—he's the Jewish kid from the Bronx who dictates what the perfect upper-class sophisticate should look like. But despite what the carefully contrived portraits in the ad campaigns might suggest, he hardly resembles the WASP ideal. He's small in stature (his Purple Label suits come in a 37 short) and fumed for months (and bitched out Anna Wintour) after a Vogue article described his hair as "frizzy." If you get up close enough to the frizz, you'll find a long, thin scar circumscribing his head, the result of surgery on a benign brain tumor in 1986.
Namedrop
Martha Stewart catered parties for Lauren in the late 1970s when she was a nobody; she's now a neighbor of his in Bedford. Serena Bass worked for him in London before she moved to New York. Famed photographer Bruce Weber was responsible for many of Lauren's iconic ad campaigns during the 1980s before he started shooting for Calvin Klein. Woody Allen asked Lauren to help design Diane Keaton's outfits for Annie Hall. It was Lauren's longstanding relationship with Bob Rubin that earned Goldman Sachs the assignment to take his company public. David Altchek operated on his knee. A long list of industry figures got their start working for Lauren, including Vera Wang, Robert Burke, Jeffrey Banks, Joseph Abboud, Candy Pratts Price, Thomas O'Brien, and Bill Sofield. Today his right-hand is retail veteran Roger Farah, the company's president and COO, and Buffy Birrittella has been one of his closest advisors for three decades. Ralph's son, David Lauren, has been groomed as the company's heir apparent and currently heads up the advertising, marketing and communications department. Bette-Ann Gwathmey, the wife of Charles Gwathmey runs his non-profit wing. And Ralph Lauren board members include FIT president Joyce Brown, former Hearst chief Frank Bennack Jr., ex-NBC chairman Bob Wright, and entertainment honcho Terry Semel.
Drama
Creating the Lauren illusion hasn't been without controversy. Staffing his company with blonde, skinny and ultra-WASPy women has repeatedly led to charges of racism over the years; to deflect the criticism, Lauren featured models of color in the 1990s. The accusations have reared their ugly head since: Following a two-year investigation, in 2001 the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that the company denied minorities the same pay and promotion as whites.
There's been plenty of drama on a personal level, too, but few in the industry have inspired as much wrath as fellow Bronx native Calvin Klein. (Lauren is older than Klein; although they grew up in the same neighborhood, they didn't know each other as kids.) The tit-for-tat played out throughout the 1980s and '90s as both men competed for dominance as America's king of fashion. Kelly Rector, Klein's second wife, once worked for Lauren as an assistant before Klein stole her away; Lauren was later rumored to be responsible for spreading word of Klein's bisexual lifestyle. The enmity was so fierce that when they both served on the board of CFDA, they coordinated schedules to ensure they wouldn't attend the same meetings.
Lauren has had other enemies, like Tommy Hilfiger, whom he's long viewed as an unoriginal copycat. (Indeed, Hilfiger's backers, Laurence Stroll and Silas Chou, used to work for Lauren.) And it's safe to say Sandra Bernhard isn't getting any invites to Casa Ralph. He was reportedly livid after she took the stage at an industry gala in 1992 and repeatedly referred to him as "Mr. Lifshitz" in front of hundreds of the industry's most important players.
Personal
Lauren met his blonde shiksa goddess, Ricky Low-Beer, in 1964 at Montefiore Hospital, where she was a receptionist. The two were married in 1968. Their relationship has survived bumps in the road including Lauren's widely-publicized affair with model Kim Nye, the face of Safari perfume in the late 1980s and 90s. (Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen's Spy was responsible for revealing the news.) The couple has three kids: In addition to David, who's the only member of the family who works for the company (and is Lauren Bush's longtime boyfriend), there's Dylan, who founded Dylan's Candy Bar with financing from her dad. Lauren's other son, Andrew, is an actor-turned-film producer who put together financing for Noah Baumbach's 2005 film The Squid & the Whale.
Family ties
Ralph's two older brothers, Jerry and Lenny, both hold titles at the company although only Jerry, who oversees the menswear line at Polo, remains actively involved. Jerry's two kids—Ralph's niece and nephew—are Greg, an actor/painter who's married to Elizabeth Berkley of Showgirls fame; and Jenny, who struggled with anorexia and bulimia for years and authored Homesick: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Finding Hope in 2004.
Habitat
Lauren controls a staggering amount of property around the world. In Manhattan, he and Ricky live in a duplex penthouse at 1107 Fifth Avenue with their Yorkshire Terrier, Bikini. (Other residents of the building include Howard Stringer and Bob Schumer.) The Laurens spend weekends at their 283-acre estate in Bedford, which Lauren paid more than $20 million to acquire way back in the 1980s and had his staff painstaking re-design—inch by inch—over the course of years. They also own a sprawling estate in Montauk purchased in the early 1980s, and a lush, beachfront property in Round Hill, Jamaica that was once owned by Babe and William Paley. Lauren has said that his favorite property, though, is the cattle ranch just outside Ridgway, Colorado that occupies 22,000 acres. The Double RL Ranch is home to more than 1,000 heads of cattle.
Toys
Ralph maintains one of the finest collections of cars in the world. His vintage cars include a 1929 Bentley, 1953 Morgan convertible, and a 1954 Ferrari. He also owns three Ferraris, three Porsches, a 2006 Bugatti—the fastest car in existence—and a 2006 Bentley, which he uses to get around day to day. (You can spot Lauren's fleet by their license plates; they all begin with the letters RLX.) Lauren has relied on private jets since he purchased his first Hawker private plane in 1982. Today he gets around on a Gulfstream V jet.
No joke
When Lauren didn't like his building's lobby, he paid out of his own pocket to have it remodeled. He's been just as attentive to the people who stand guard in the lobby, too. It's rumored he paid the college tuition for several of his doormen's kids.
If you enjoyed this post, other posts and enjoy reading LA*SURFPUNK THE MENS STORE--Please take a moment to make a donation to keep this blog alive!!! You can click the donate button at the top right of the page. We thank you!!
Read more of my blog by clicking the title or subject listings on the right.
Email friends of my postings with the EMAIL icon at the bottom of each post.
And as always, feel free to comment.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
No comments:
Post a Comment