Selling a Dream of Elegance and the Good Life
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It was Lauren's older brother Jerry, now the head of Polo's menswear design department, who suggested when Ralph was 16 that the siblings change their surname. "Lifshitz was a burden," Jerry recalls. "I was in the Air Force reserve, and I got tired of being on the defensive at mail call with somebody fooling around with the sound of my name. It was silly to live with it. It wasn't some family dynasty." Ralph and Jerry rattled off potential names to each other and settled almost randomly on Lauren, which sounded euphonious to them.
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At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Lauren attended business classes but paid little attention to studies. His adolescent idols were British and American style setters: the Duke of Windsor, for example, and Katharine Hepburn, who stole the show in The Philadelphia Story with her pants-and-pearls look. Lauren's early fashion education was basically a home- study course that he recalls being a "combination of movies and reading Esquire." Says he: "Whether that world exists or not, I don't know. I saw things as they should have been, not as they were."
Lauren worked part time, accepting returned garments in a budget-price department store, to earn money to buy classically cut clothes at Manhattan's Brooks Bros. In his high school yearbook, Lauren confidently listed his ambition as "millionaire." The entry was a gag, he claims today, but his brother Jerry remembers that Ralph had a "constant urge to make something happen. He was always reaching for more."
Ralph tried a stint at New York's City College but decided to drop out, at least partly, he says, because it was an aesthetic letdown. "There was no wonderful campus with boys and girls wearing V-neck sweaters," he explains, as though he still feels he missed something in life.
Lauren subsequently served a hitch in the Army reserve, then got a seasonal job at Brooks Bros. as a clerk during the Christmas rush. At 22 he went to work as a New York regional salesman for Abe Rivetz, a Boston necktie manufacturer. Lauren made the rounds of his Long Island wholesale customers dressed in tweeds and driving a British Morgan convertible. Pondering fashion trends as he traveled, he decided around 1964 that the men who wore the narrow ties of the early '60s were ready for a change to wider, more colorful designs. While Lauren was not a particularly gifted sketch artist, he knew how to put together a fashionable ensemble. "I would walk (into a room) and my clients would say, 'I want what you are wearing.' My instincts were there. I didn't think I was a designer, but I had ideas." In those days, garment company bosses generally called the shots in the fashion business, and American clothing designers were only beginning to achieve acceptance as entrepreneurs. Lauren managed to persuade his employers to let him design a few innovative cravats, but when new management took over the firm the budding designer was told the world was not ready for Ralph Lauren. He migrated to a larger men's-furnishings company, Beau Brummel, which agreed to manufacture his original neckwear. Lauren needed a brand name and wanted something that sounded tweedy and British. Cricket? Rugby? Polo! That was it, even though Lauren had never been to a match. "We thought of everything," says Lauren . with a grin. "I couldn't call it Basketball."