The mission to broaden this highest expression of Ralph Lauren menswear from luxury tailoring and boardroom-class weekendwear to be compatible with every dialect in the designer’s canon continues apace. For this season there was particularly concerted outreach to Ranch Ralph and and RRL-esque Ralph—weathered military vintage seasoned with a pinch of Himalayan explorer.
Held high in the Ralph Lauren Madison Avenue aerie, this presentation was subdivided into complementary stories of color and theme. The opening one, the scene-setter, was overwhelmingly black: The first three looks were collared evening jackets in black-on-black jacquards of coiled snakes, Southwestern weave, or a bucking bronco design sourced from a vintage boys’ sleeping bag, worn above black denim evening jeans with a grosgrain flash. A cowboy fringed zip-up hoodie in subtly, spongily bolstered jersey, sweats featuring the Polo bear reimagined as a man-in-black gunslinger, a down jacket in wool twill with Western-shirt piping, and floral and monochrome Southwestern jackets all emphasized the integration of the wilder Western Lauren codes into this most urbanely upscale label on his roster. Gray, brown, and olive stories were more conventionally Purple, featuring some wonderful blended check woollen safari shackets; deconstructed cashmere tweed jackets; raglan-shouldered micro-check overcoats; and satin-lapelled, Windsor-collared corduroy evening jackets of a rakishly generous drape.
A return to olive at the end inserted a second phase of cross-pollination into the military mountaineer. A fiercely lovable sateen finish parka, technical pants, and cashmere sweats embroidered with roaring tigers and Himalayan vistas, and a fantastic rough-hemmed coat in straight-haired shearling with Mongolian-inspired beading at its cuffs and hem were some of the standouts here. Amongst them, slightly incongruously, was what this punter reckoned the coolest piece of all: a herringbone-weave heavy linen jacket in navy, with narrow red piping, frogging at its shoulders, and tarnished metal buttons with Southwestern ribbons at the cuff. Based on a turn-of-the-20th-century French fireman’s jacket from Lauren’s stockpile of vintage, it had frankly no place here in terms of the story these clothes told. Yet the instinct to include something so lovely, whatever the part its provenance played in some bigger picture, was an admirable example of Purple Label’s increasingly for-everyone outlook.
