Ralph Lauren (born Ralph Lifshitz; born 14 October 1939)

Biography

Ralph Lifshitz was born on 14 October 1939 in the Bronx, New York City, the youngest of four children of Frank Lifshitz, a house painter and muralist, and Frieda Lifshitz. His grandparents and father had emigrated from Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, settling in the working-class Mosholu Parkway section of the Bronx.

Even as a boy, Ralph dressed differently from everyone around him. He wore his older brothers' hand-me-downs with a sense of proportion that wasn't taught to him, learned to tie a Shetland sweater around his shoulders just so, and rolled the cuffs of his jeans in a particular, deliberate way. He worked after-school jobs specifically to buy the suits he admired, and imagined, at various points, wanting to be a teacher in a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, or a professional athlete. Asked in his DeWitt Clinton High School yearbook what he wanted to do with his life, he wrote that he wanted to be a millionaire.

He changed his surname from Lifshitz to Lauren while still a teenager, in the mid-1950s, years before there was any company to put the new name on.

Ralph studied business at night at what is now Baruch College, dropping out after two years, and served in the United States Army from 1962 to 1964. That same period, he took a sales job at Brooks Brothers, absorbing the traditional American tailoring the store was built on from the inside.

In 1964, at an eye doctor's office, he met Ricky Anne Low-Beer, who was working there as a receptionist. The two married on 20 December 1964, six months after meeting. 

They would go on to have three children: Andrew Lauren, born 1969, David Lauren, born 1971, and Dylan Lauren, born 1974. 

In 1967, Lauren, at 28 years old, worked for the tie manufacturer Beau Brummell(named after the eighteenth-century dandy), where he convinced the company's president to let him start his own line, a line of wide neckties, unfashionably bold for the era but cut from unusually good fabric. He worked out of a "drawer" from a showroom in the Empire State Building, and made deliveries to stores himself.

He called his own line 'Polo' in 1968. He had never played the sport, never watched a match, and had no connection to it whatsoever; the word simply conjured, with total accuracy, the world of inherited wealth and effortless athleticism he wanted his clothes to sell. The ties succeeded immediately.

Lauren then launched his first full menswear line the following year, built around classic tweed suits, drawing openly on the men he most admired as dressers: the Duke of Windsor, Cary Grant, and Fred Astaire, an old Hollywood and old-money elegance he studied from a distance rather than inherited. 

A womenswear line followed in 1971, reworking the same tailored vocabulary with a softer, more feminine hand. 

In 1972, Ralph introduced the piece that would carry his name into households that had never bought a necktie: a mesh cotton sport shirt bearing the small embroidered emblem of a polo player, mid-swing, on horseback.

In 1974, he outfitted the male cast of The Great Gatsby in costumes from his Polo line – a 1920s-style series of men's suits and sweaters, except for the pink suit which Lauren designed especially for Robert Redford's Jay Gatsby. 

Ralph built his company around an idea few designers had pursued before him: not just clothes, but an entire imagined way of life, sold as a single coherent world across menswear, womenswear, denim, children's clothing, and eventually home furnishings, each new line another room in the same fictional country house.

The company entered the European market, and went international in 1981 with the opening of the first freestanding store for an American designer on New Bond Street in the West End of London, England.In early 1987, Ralph was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. He underwent surgery that April and recovered fully, returning to run his company at the same pace as before.

Ralph Lauren opened his first flagship in the Rhinelander mansion, on Madison Avenue and 72nd Street in New York City in 1986. Lauren re-created the building's original opulence with a young design consultant named Naomi Leff, with whom he had previously worked on Ralph Lauren Home.

On June 12, 1997, the company became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.

The business he built around the Polo name eventually became a multi-billion-dollar public company. His son David went on to become one of its senior executives, marrying Lauren Bush, niece of President George W. Bush and granddaughter of President George H. W. Bush, in 2011. His daughter Dylan built her own separate business, Dylan's Candy Bar, in New York.

In September 2015, after nearly fifty years running the company he had founded, Ralph stepped down as chief executive, handing the role to Stefan Larsson while remaining executive chairman and chief creative officer. 

"I am not stepping down, nor am I stepping back," he told employees at the time. "I am stepping up." He has continued to guide the brand's creative direction into the present day, the Bronx house painter's son still, six decades on, designing the world of old-money ease he first imagined from the outside looking in.