The Great Fashion Designers (30 page)

In 1964 Lauren married Ricky Low-Beer, the blonde 19-year-old only child of Viennese Jewish immigrants. A college girl with a classy, educated manner, she was his romantic ideal. They have three children, Andrew, David and Dylan. Despite strong and well-substantiated rumours (detailed at length in Michael Gross's book) of a run of long affairs with other women, Lauren has clearly never doubted that his marriage to Ricky would endure, the central relationship of his life.

Polo grew fast. In 1968 the full menswear range was launched, and in 1969, the first menswear shop-within-a-shop in Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. In 1971 he launched his first womenswear collection, a line of tailored shirts, and opened the first Polo store in Beverly Hills, California. In 1972 he introduced the short-sleeved cotton knit polo shirt with its polo-player logo. It was advertised with the slogan, ‘Every team has its color—Polo has 24.' In 1974, Lauren provided the men's clothes for the film
The Great Gatsby
, starring Robert Redford, who was to become a lifelong friend. In 1977 he designed the clothes for Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in
Annie Hall
, starting a trend for androgyny in womenswear—baggy trousers, masculine shirts, waistcoats and ties worn at half-mast. In 1978, inspired by his ranch in Colorado, and, of course, by the mythic movies of the Old West, he launched Western wear for men and women, an enduring style within his canon and a riposte to those who accused him of being in thrall to an archaic and irrelevant Britishness.

In the same year Lauren launched his first perfumes, Lauren and Polo for Men, and his collection of boys' clothes. The following year he created the first of his multi-image advertising campaigns in which the pictures were styled as stills from a film. In 1981 his Santa Fe collection, based on traditional Navajo colours, patterns and details, was so beautiful fashion editors wept and so evocative it became the most copied collection of the decade. Simultaneously, the first Polo store in Europe—and the first American designer label store—opened on Bond Street. While women were scrambling to dress as hybrid Native American maidens and covered-wagon pioneer women, men were going ‘preppy'. Polo's preppy look was considered the power suit of the early 1980s, the uniform of Tom Wolfe's ‘Masters of the Universe' who peopled Wall Street. Lauren sourced many elements in his collections in Britain, especially knitwear and fabrics, and he went to London for his tailoring, commissioning classics like the blue blazer made leaner, younger for his customer. It was supplanted mid-decade by Armani's deconstructed, sleeves-rolled
American Gigolo
look.

In 1982 Lauren launched his home collection, each range within it a complete set dressing for one of his re-imagined worlds. Four years later he opened his flagship store in the Rhinelander mansion on Madison Avenue and the Polo store in Paris. In 1990 he introduced Safari, the fragrance, accessorised by a whole lifestyle package, and as the decade progressed, he developed the Polo Sport ranges for men and women and the Polo Jeans Co for the young. Expanding simultaneously up the market, he introduced the Purple Label men's tailoring collection, personally starring in the advertisements. In 1997, Lauren took his company public while retaining 90 per cent control, and in 1999, he opened the largest Polo store in the world in Chicago with an adjacent Ralph Lauren restaurant, launching the Ralph by Ralph Lauren collection for 16- to 25-year-old women and also acquiring Club Monaco. In the 2000s Lauren devoted much time to charities and film festivals but found time to launch ranges of fine jewellery and watches.

He is so immensely wealthy that he has said he couldn't possible spend it all. He has the ranch in Colorado, homes in Jamaica and on Long Island, an estate in Bedford, New York, as well as his Fifth Avenue Manhattan address. His collection
of vintage cars ranges from a 1929 Bentley and a 1937 Alfa Romeo to a 1938 Bugatti and a 1962 Ferrari.

Polo generally preferred licensing to manufacturing, but in recent years it has been buying many back in order to reassert control over all aspects of the brand. The firm operates about 275 retail and outlet stores in the United States and licenses more than 100 others around the world.

Further reading:
For Lauren's work, see Colin McDowell's monograph,
Ralph Lauren: The Man, the Vision, the Style
(2002), and for Lauren's life, see Michael Gross's
Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren
(2003).

In the introduction to the first book on the work of Issey Miyake,
East Meets West
, published in 1978, Diana Vreeland, then retired from US
Vogue
and heading the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, wrote, ‘His clothes are totally his and his alone. I love you, Issey, and the way you carry on and on and on, from your centuries old traditions, down through the ages, utilising your total instinct and great integrity to present artistry and beautiful inspirations that are so well applied to the present tense of East and West.'

Miyake's vision is unique. He was the precursor, leader and mentor of a new school of Japanese design, which took the fashion world by storm in the early 1980s. He was not the first Japanese designer to find fame in the West, but he was the first to create something new and revolutionary. He drew deeply on both oriental and occidental traditions of dress to produce the hybrid style that was to change everyone's perceptions of what clothing could be.

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, he was cycling to school on 6 August 1945 when the Americans dropped the atom bomb. He lost most of his family, including his mother, who was severely burned and died four years later. She had carried on working as a teacher despite her injuries. Perhaps as a consequence, he has always surrounded himself with strong, clever women. At ten, Miyake developed a bone marrow disease which affects him to this day. ‘The Japan I grew up in was a very poor country,' he told Brenda Polan. ‘My generation dreamed of going to America. We believed the future lay there.' Post-war Japan was dominated culturally by the occupying American forces. Within that culture the most desirable clothing for men was the classic Ivy League leisure wear worn by off-duty American officers—club ties, button-down shirts, penny loafers and navy blazers. Japanese women of the time craved traditional Parisian chic of the kind featured in the copies of
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
that his sister bought and he read curiously—a desire which Hanae Mori, the first Japanese fashion designer to make a name abroad, sought to satisfy.

Miyake never doubted, when he brought his clothes to New York in 1971 and to Paris in 1973, that they would have an international appeal. A lifelong experimenter and collaborator, seeking out the best, most creative minds to work with, he has probably always been confident in his vision of fashion, a vision which eschews voltes-face and looks instead to evolution. He is a clever, gentle, modest man, movie-star handsome and charismatic; consequently, he makes friends and lifelong fans wherever he goes. But a huge part of his magnetism derives from his passionate commitment to his ideas and his willingness to explain, to engage, to proselytise.

Miyake studied art at Tama University in Tokyo, graduating in 1965 with a degree in graphic design. He had begun designing clothing in 1962, and in 1963 he presented his first real collection, entitled A Poem of Cloth and Stone, at the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry. His stated—and possibly precocious—ambition was to show that clothes could be both utilitarian and visually creative. ‘We want,' he said at the time, ‘to stimulate the imagination through clothing. Though these designs draw their inspiration from contemporary style, it is not really a fashion show. I think the next step will be clothing that looks to the future. There are many long dresses in the show not meant as eveningwear, but
simply because of the form. I would like this show to mark the birth of visual clothing in Japan.'

To develop his skills and his thinking, he enrolled on a course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and spent five years in Paris and New York working with established fashion designers. He was less impressed by his time at Laroche and Givenchy than by the youth-focused, mini-loving vitality he found in the weekends he spent in London, visiting the theatre and the galleries, wandering the King's Road, shopping and getting his hair cut.

While he was in Paris, the political revolt of May 1968 disturbed everyone, even the denizens of the bourgeois salons of couture. The workers occupied the Renault plant and the students took to the streets, manning the modern-day barricades of burnt-out trams and dustbins and digging up the cobblestones to throw through the clouds of tear gas at the armed and armoured police. London, too, was witness to student rebellion and violence on the streets as youngsters, some left wing, all indignant, marched in support of their American peers being drafted to wage war in Vietnam.

Miyake's friend, the architect Arata Isozaki, wrote in
East Meets West:

I am not certain whether or not he had already formed his own critical opinion of haute couture, a staunchly regulated genre of international fashion. However, finding himself in Paris, a city full of suspicion and jealousy, faced by a language barrier which handicapped his liberty, he probably saw no reason to remain where he was, and thus, he took flight. One of the characteristics of the protest movement was impulsive body action; energy was burnt. After that, in the vacuum, the question loomed once again in front of him: ‘As a designer, what are clothes?'

His flight from the world of couture took him to New York and the studio of Geoffrey Beene. There his attention was caught by the classless, genderless American uniform of jeans and T-shirt he saw worn by workers, weekending executives and militant students alike. Back in Tokyo in 1970, Miyake set up his design studio and looked back to his own cultural inheritance to examine the possibilities of Japanese work wear, its cheap but laboriously worked textiles, the kimono and the costumes of the samurai of the Edo period, costumes that were elaborately constructed of many simple, rectilinear garments and swathes of fabric. ‘I thought,' he told Brenda Polan in 1983, ‘that the occidental clothing tradition was too tight. I wanted to make things that were free both mentally and physically. I had to free myself from the occidental tradition, of the occidental way, of occidental ideas. But there are still a lot of things to learn from them; it is important to respect that long tradition, the things that Paris couture was really about—even with all its elitism.'

For the Japanese tight clothing was traditionally not at all sexy. ‘The Japanese body does not have sculptural beauty and expresses little sex appeal,' wrote the painter, Tadanori Yokoo. ‘Sex appeal is a spiritual matter, not a physical one.' Sensuality is found in large volumes of fabric, luxuriously textured, cut in imposing, almost abstract shapes, layered and wrapped. The Japanese use the body as a template for a three-dimensional sculptural shape. At rest these costumes have a kind of grandeur; in movement they have a fluid grace. They tease the senses through the imagination. They are subtle, the product of a social system which is constructed to ease relationships on a few overcrowded islands and which, consequently, is heavily reliant on ritual, formality and restraint.

Miyake had developed a theory he called ‘peeling away to the limit', throwing away all the inhibiting ideas about dress imposed by Western cultural imperialism and starting again from the beginning—the bolt of cloth, the hank of yarn. He began his great experiment with
sashiko
, the traditionally patterned, often striped, quilted cotton worn by Japanese peasants. He chose as his collaborator textile designer Makiko Minagawa, who was interested in mixing various yarns, natural and synthetic, to bring out the ‘essence' of a fabric, exploring its potential for movement, texture and tactility as far as possible.

At first the resulting clothing consisted of pieces of irregularly shaped fabric almost suspended about the body—Miyake was interested in the ‘space between' body and clothing—each piece of which could be stripped away. This he developed into
layering and wrapping, and his unparalleled feeling for texture, mass and volume became apparent. He himself attributed much of his thinking to the influence of Madeleine Vionnet; she too preferred to suspend the fabric from the body and allow it to follow its own nature, assuming new shapes as the wearer moved. In his collections he would achieve magical effects, creating garments which arrived on the runway as one thing—a jacket, a kimono, a slender skirt—and which would, with the shrug of the shoulder, the swift movement of a wrist, become something else entirely—a skirt, a pair of shorts, a hooded poncho. His delight in all manner of materials led to experimentation with plastic, bamboo and various kinds of paper to produce masks, hierarchic headdresses, pseudo-armour reminiscent of samurai gear, and clothes that evoked thoughts of kites, heraldic banners, origami and modern abstract sculpture.