The New Downtown Dress Code: Ralphcore

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Close your eyes. Picture someone who wears Polo Ralph Lauren. Other than Ralph himself, who springs to mind? A dad—or grandfather—from your country club? A ball boy or girl at the U.S. Open? Maybe it’s Diane Keaton as Annie Hall or Will Smith as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air or Princess Diana.

Maybe it’s you in college, if you enrolled between the late ’80s and the early aughts. Fresh in the pop culture record is Taylor Swift on the cover of Time and Jacob Elordi in Saltburn, in which he wears a ­cornflower-blue Polo V-neck over a white T-shirt when Oliver first lays his lovesick eyes on him across the Oxford quad.

None of these answers are wrong. In fact, all of them are spot-on for one of the many archetypes—preppy, hip-hop, athlete, aristocrat—that Lauren has conjured in the 56 years since he launched Polo. More recently someone not usually associated with the Canon of Ralph has popped up wearing those signature ponies all over town: the creative cool kid.

Usually found downtown, whether that means Ridgewood, Queens, or Silver Lake in L.A., these characters wear Polo in a kind of post-ironic way, finding the once ubiquitous rugby shirts, windbreakers, and American flag and Polo Bear sweaters on vintage or resale sites and folding them into their everyday wardrobes.

Even the brand is getting in on the act, curating capsules of vintage pieces that routinely sell out. Ralphcore, in a word, is taking place against the backdrop of a larger preppy revival in pop culture that’s the byproduct of internet nostalgia, led by Instagram and TikTok accounts enchanted by party and street style pictures from an era before social media. Fashion too is taking its cues from an idea of aspirational Americana that Polo personifies, and younger brands, including Teddy Santis’s Aimé Leon Dore, Wales Bonner, Sporty & Rich, and Noah (co-founded by Brendon Babenzien, who is leading menswear for the revamped, Polo-fied J.Crew), all owe a massive debt to Ralph Lauren.

On a recent morning Haley Wollens, a stylist best known for her frequent collaborations with Chloë Sevigny, wore a Polo rugby on her morning coffee run on New York’s Lower East Side (not far from where this story was photographed, at the Nine Orchard hotel). “My style is pretty wacko, but sometimes I feel like I look best when I’m just preppy,” she says. Except she’s not just preppy. She and her cohort prefer their Polo a little rumpled, a little subverted. In 2022 Wollens, the designer Lou Dallas, and the graffiti writer Claudia Gold (tag: Claw Money) took a bunch of old Polo rugby shirts, cut them up, and printed all over them to create a small capsule.

“People went crazy for them,” Wollens says. Chris Peters, the designer behind CDLM, a fashion line made from upcycled vintage, and a consultant for the cult label Puppets and Puppets, got into vintage Polo during the pandemic, when he was staying with his parents in his childhood home in New Jersey. Most of his clothes were back in Manhattan, so he dipped into his brother’s Polo trove from high school. It felt right. He likes the contrast between the tailoring of the clothes and his own aesthetic.

“I wouldn’t say I’m grubby, but I wear kind of fucked-up stuff,” he says, adding that he and his partner, the ceramicist Shane Gabier, seek out ’90s Polo, preferably artfully stained or sun-bleached, on eBay. “We’re deep in it,” Peters says. “We have a running list of Polos and buy one or two every other week.”

Field Jacket

Cotton Chino Ball Cap

14-Karat Gold Pearl Necklace

Relaxed Fit Striped Cotton Shirt

It’s not just arty types seeking semi­destroyed garments with whom Polo is resonating. Beverly Nguyen, proprietor of her namesake homewares shop, now mixes in Polo with the polished, often hot look she favors. The American flag sweater she originally owned as a five-year-old? She got a new one last summer.

“I’ve never seen Polo not being worn,” Nguyen says, although she has noticed a recent uptick that she credits to fondness for an aesthetic embodied by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, old school Gap and J.Crew catalogs, and, of course, Polo. Then there’s The Crown recalling Princess Diana’s affection for Polo button-downs and collegiate sweatshirts over bike shorts. “It’s that longing for all-American sportswear. There aren’t a lot of American heritage brands that exist anymore.”

Polo, launched originally in 1967 as a collection of neckties inspired by Old Hollywood, has long since reached the point of universality. Within five years Lauren had opened his first store on Rodeo Drive and introduced the Polo pony and the iconic cotton mesh Polo shirt in a rainbow of colors. It was just the beginning. With its many subsets and licensing deals over the years, there’s something for everyone to buy into.

“One thing that helps Polo always retain some baseline of relevance is that there are so many different directions that Ralph Lauren went in,” says Jonah Weiner, co-­author of the menswear newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. Weiner found himself down a vintage Polo rabbit hole last year, chasing a color­block jacket from the Polo Country line, informally known as the Red Line, via an Insta­gram reseller.

“There’s the western end of the spectrum occupied by Polo Country and RRL. There’s the more classically tailored energy of Ralph Lauren Purple Label and the main line. There’s the distinctly American, collegiate register of the slouchy, ’80s/’90s prep, defined by loose, pleated pants, frayed collars, and stretched-out mismatched socks. We see that at a lot of new brands that are extremely expensive,” Weiner says. As for the rugby shirt, it’s been embraced over the years by everyone from hip-hop artists to ravers. “That gives them an unending life—it’s like how the sun is always shining somewhere.”

Aran-Knit Flag Cotton Sweater

Sperry x Brooks Brothers Authentic Original™ Kiltie Boat Shoe

Metal-Accent Leather Belt

Denim Maxi Skirt

For a large swath of the population, Polo has transcended fashion to become the fabric of people’s lives, no matter where they come from. “The working classes in the UK always latched onto certain designer names as a way of elevating themselves,” says London-based hair stylist Halley Brisker, whose clients include actors Lily James, Julianne Moore, and Eve Hewson. “For a long time when I was growing up, Ralph was a real emblem of a certain type of working class person who would wear it on the weekend to go to the pub, because they were like, ‘Yeah, this is nice gear.’ ”

In his teens and twenties Brisker was one of them, but as the Polo-wearing tide shifted toward Jersey Shore types (“chavs,” in British parlance), he says, “I went off it.” Then one day nearly 20 years later, he bought a pink rugby shirt emblazoned with the word Polo across the chest and a matching bucket hat that looked like something he owned during his Polo 1.0 phase.

“As with everything in fashion,” Brisker says, “when things become uncool enough, they become cool again.”

Lead image credits: Dries Van Noten coat ($2,855); Loro Piana sweater ($1,600); Polo Ralph Lauren shorts ($148), top (under sweater, $110), and cap ($50); Dolce & Gabbana flower brooch ($625); the Society Archive necklaces (from $198); Cartier watch ($18,600); Seaman Schepps ring.

Hair by Jerome Cultrera for Living Proof at l’Atelier NYC. Makeup by Ayaka Nihei for Charlotte Tilbury at Walter Schupfer Agency. Nails by Yukie Miyakawa for Chanel Le Vernis at See Management. Models: Alvina Bokhari and Devin Yarde, Direction USA. Lucy Rae McFadin at Ford Models. Shot on location at Nine Orchard.

This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Sir Mix-a-Lot." SUBSCRIBE NOW

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