After a pair of shows staged at MoMA in New York and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, Ralph Lauren opted for a lookbook reveal and showroom appointments for his new collection. He’s a designer as adept at creating a mood as he is cutting a suit, but we’ll have to wait until next season for an IRL RL experience.
As it happens, tailoring was on Lauren’s agenda here, and naturally there were chalk stripe suits. Though we saw many on the fall runways, no designer can stake a greater claim to the look than Lauren. More often, however, he was up to more unconventional things: pairing a classically tailored tweed jacket with fringed and distressed leather pants, adding a western belt with silver and turquoise details to a classic single-breasted blazer and pleated trousers, cutting a puffer in natty glen plaid, or recreating the look of his signature chalk stripes with beading on a black smoking.
The designer himself has long embraced the surprising mix with his own personal style—for proof see his runway bows over the years. There he is at his 50th anniversary show in Central Park in 2018, with faded blue jeans and metal-toed cowboy boots accessorizing his tuxedo. Or check out his fall 2016 show, when he teamed a tweed jacket with a well-loved leather vest whose patina looks not unlike some of the pieces in this lineup.
He liked the patina effect enough to incorporate it into his evening wear, where that kind of treatment is decidedly more unexpected. Note the fading at the shoulders of a crystal embellished black velvet jacket and on the strapless bodice of a purple flocked denim evening dress. Fluttering silk dresses dyed similarly deep shades of red and green were finished with substantial cowboy belts, tying the day and night parts of the collection together.
Lauren dressed Malala Yousafzai in a custom-made sequin-embroidered tulle gown with an integrated head covering at the Oscars last month. The female education activist and Nobel Prize laureate had the best line of the night when she told Jimmy Kimmel “I only talk about peace.” A stretch jersey dress here had the same twisting detail at the waist, but a more low-key vibe. For customers who liked the look of her metallic sequins, there was a one-shoulder number in gunmetal micro-pleats and a platinum silk velvet gown with crinoline underlayers that gave it a more structured, couture-ish shape, both were eye-catching.
