Word: laurenized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Above all, Lauren is the boss. He huddles for most of the day with fashion assistants and corporate colleagues, at one moment expostulating before a trio of dark-suited subordinates and the next pondering an advertising display among a group of young designers clad in a palette of pale blue variations on his own favorite garb. Lauren pays his employees well and rewards loyalty, but he can be a blunt taskmaster. "He is absolutely terrible about hiding his feelings," says Buffy Birrittella, Polo/Ralph Lauren's vice president for advertising and communications. In an industry notorious for its creative egos, Lauren...
...broad schemes for new wares, often leaving his staff to come up with many of the specific details, materials and manufacturing plans. "I really love the idea of dark paisley sheets," he announced at a meeting one day. When his designers scurried back into conclave with fabric samples, Lauren demanded, "No, no! I want them darker, darker, darker...
...Lauren constantly scours his surroundings for design ideas. His taste is eclectic, though not unpredictable: he is chronically hooked on classics. "I love jeans, cowboy boots, tweed jackets, pin-stripe suits, old race cars, Porsches, Indian blankets and baskets," he says. Lauren once chased down a Colorado cowboy whose battered jeep he wanted to buy on the spot. Observes WWD Editor McCarthy: "Everything he sees or does comes back to his work. He is totally consumed...
...Often Lauren finds what he wants right under his nose. One of his first women's tennis dresses was reportedly a takeoff on an old Hunter College gym suit that his wife kept around the apartment. (The designer met his wife Ricky, a former schoolteacher, in 1964 on a visit to a New York City eye doctor's office, where she was working part time. They were married six months later.) Lauren took the inspiration for the ruby red glass bottles that contain his women's cologne, called Lauren, from his favorite antique inkwells. He solicits advice from his daughter...
...result of that assiduousness, Lauren has been criticized as being a promoter rather than a designer, a copycat who turns traditional ideas into high-priced knock-offs. Case in point: his lined dungaree jacket with corduroy collar, a $98 rendering of an item that sells for about $35 with the Lee blue- jean label. Yet what Lauren is accused of taking from tradition is & systematically reborrowed from him by dozens of his smaller competitors...