BrandAmerican
Ralph Lauren
0 active items
Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz on October 14, 1939, in the Bronx, New York, to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood, he developed an early interest in the aesthetic markers of a world far removed from his own, prep school clothes, Ivy League tailoring, the visual grammar of Anglo-American privilege. At sixteen, he and his brother changed their surname to Lauren. After high school and a stint in the US Army, Lauren worked as a salesman for Brooks Brothers before moving into the necktie trade at Rivetz and then Beau Brummell.
In 1967, still at Beau Brummell, Lauren persuaded the company's president to let him start his own tie line. Working from a single drawer in a shared showroom at the Empire State Building, he launched Ralph Lauren Corporation with wide, boldly designed ties at a time when the industry favoured narrow cuts. He named the line Polo, a word with no direct connection to his life, but one that carried the associations he was after. By 1968 he had expanded into a full menswear collection, and by 1969 Bloomingdale's had built a Polo shop-in-shop. In 1971, Lauren introduced a line of women's tailored shirts bearing the now-familiar polo player emblem on the cuff, the first time the logo appeared.
The 1970s brought rapid expansion. Lauren designed the costumes for the 1974 film The Great Gatsby and for Annie Hall in 1977, both projects that aligned perfectly with the aspirational, vintage-inflected Americana he was building into a coherent identity. In 1972, the cotton mesh Polo shirt arrived in an array of colours and became one of the most widely copied garments in twentieth-century fashion. Fragrances followed in 1978, Lauren for women, Polo for men, deepening the brand's hold on the lifestyle market.
The move into home furnishings in 1983 was a logical extension of the total-environment vision Lauren had been constructing since the beginning. Ralph Lauren Home introduced furniture, bedding, tableware, and decorative accessories, making the brand one of the first fashion houses to offer a fully furnished domestic world. The lighting partnership with Visual Comfort & Co., which produced table lamps, chandeliers, and floor lamps under the Ralph Lauren Home name, explains the table lamps and glass pieces that appear at Swedish auction houses, objects purchased as part of interior design schemes that eventually return to the secondary market.
At Nordic auction houses, Ralph Lauren pieces appear across a notably varied range of categories: clothing and bags at Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, alongside home accessories and Visual Comfort lighting. Top auction prices include 6,624 SEK for a shoulder bag and 3,400 SEK for a Ralph Lauren table lamp. The spread of categories, from Miscellaneous clothing to Handbags, Table Lamps, and Glass, reflects the breadth of a brand that has deliberately positioned itself across multiple domestic and personal spheres.