IMAGES OF EMPIRE : Ralph Lauren’s New Polo Store Stakes a Claim on Rodeo Drive
THIS MONTH RALPH Lauren opens a new Polo emporium, second in size and scope only to his flagship manor on New York’s trendy Madison Avenue, bringing his “instant tradition” to the Los Angeles area. To many in the design community, the intriguing question was: How would Polo’s aristocratic appeal be translated into a fantasy with which Rodeo Drive shoppers would identify?
Jerry Magnin, a silver-haired entrepreneur who personifies the preppy Polo look in chinos, horn-rimmed glasses and oxford shirt, has had the Los Angeles County Polo franchise since 1971. At that time his Polo menswear store opened one year after the launching of his adjacent Jerry Magnin store, which carried clothes by European designers. Both stores closed this month; the latter will re-open at a not-yet-disclosed location. “We needed more space,” explains Magnin. It took years to find a larger location to accommodate a combined Polo menswear and women’s-wear store, but last year he was able to obtain 17,000 square feet at 444 N. Rodeo Drive.
The East Coast Establishment, with its roots in Anglophilia, has always inspired the dreams of the upwardly mobile, and a wave of what has been dubbed “WASPmania” is currently sweeping the fashionable set in New York. However, Westerners are known for rejecting the past in favor of the future and admiring personal achievement more than bloodlines. Speculation around town was that Polo on Rodeo would find its inspiration in the old Hollywood aristocracy--photos of Darryl Zanuck and his star-studded polo team, for instance. “The thought never came up,” Magnin states flatly. Other people surmised that the store would have a Santa Fe look, since many of Ralph Lauren’s designs are inspired by the cowboy and Indian motifs of the West. “No, I don’t see selling a business suit in an adobe house,” Magnin says.
“The New York store is a British men’s club in a big city, so ours should be a British men’s club in a more casual environment--like the colonies of the British West Indies, India and Africa,” Magnin says. Or as Buffy Birrittella, Polo’s vice president of advertising and communications, puts it, “We didn’t want the Los Angeles store to feel too grand. The relation between the New York and Los Angeles stores is more like the formality of London to the informality of Jamaica.”
Why the colonies? “I think the atmosphere lends itself to the design of Ralph’s clothes. I think people today like tradition in a world where relationships seem to be more casual and shallow,” Magnin says.
Magnin credits his wife Lois with coming up with the British Colonial design concept a year ago when the creative team that put this project together--Birrittella, Direc tor of Creative Services Jeff Walker, architect Naomi Leff, Director of Polo Store Development Jerry Robertson and Magnin himself--met at poolside at his house in Malibu to brainstorm. “Lois said, ‘Why don’t we do something with a Colonial theme, like Clarence Dillon’s house in Jamaica?’ ” he says. (Lauren had bought the Dillon house in Round Hill, Jamaica, a few years ago.) The team agreed, and back in New York Lauren gave it his imprimatur.
Then, for inspiration, the creative team began screening “Out of Africa,” “Passage to India” and “The Jewel in the Crown” and reading books such as “Traditional Indian Architecture” and “The Raj.” Leff and Birrittella then assembled “concept boards”--collages of mood shots of rooms and accessories (e.g., a photograph of a rose they wanted for the Beverly Hills store). The concept boards then went to Lauren for final selection and editing.
Leff made pencil sketches of the overall design with numbered locations for antiques, and the antique-hunting safari began. Jerry Magnin sent forth a dozen scouts to shop in more than a hundred warehouses in the United States and England. They shipped, by Magnin’s estimate, 2,000-3,000 props back to warehouses in Los Angeles to be restored and “retrofitted” (converted to merchandise-display fixtures). The props included shepherds’ crooks and a set of Louis Vuitton luggage dating back to 1870.
Building materials and ornamentation were manufactured, for the most part, in California. The creative team sought out local artisans to make the honey-toned mahogany shutters and paneling, the Georgian carved balustrade, the plaster moldings and columns, an “authentic” glassy-smooth stucco unlike the rougher Mexican style and a paver for the courtyard entry concocted with the traditional crushed shell and marble used in India. A marble entry was nixed by Lauren as “too glitzy” says Birrittella, who adds that Lauren also rejected a tomato-red room “because he thought it was ‘trying too hard.’ ”
Walls are painted the same shade of cream throughout, except for one light-blue room, for a look lighter than that of the heavily paneled New York store. The music system was designed by Los Angeles sound ace Peter Christian, who did the Hard Rock Cafe. Custom Tapes are programmed to set the morning mood with calm classical music and build to an energizing beat at 4 in the afternoon to bolster the spirits of weary shoppers.
Lighting creates “a psychological reference to home,” says Leff, by the use of small lamps throughout the store and natural sunshine streaming through the windows into the home-furnishings rooms upstairs--rooms with themes such as “Duke and Duchess,” “Thoroughbred,” “New England” and “Porcelain.”
The creative team uses the words home and family again and again. Says Robertson: “The store is designed like a home--the point being to sell products in the environment they are meant to be used in.” Birrittella says the models in the ads (whose photos are also displayed in table-top frames in the store) are photographed “to look like a family of different generations and real relationships.” This is the essence of the Polo marketing pitch: All these trappings of ancestor worship--and other people’s ancestors at that--provide an effective ambiance that encourages shoppers to feel that a purchase brings inclusion in the idyllic life of that perfect family behind the closed doors of their elegant homes and clubs.
Will these images from the great days of the Empire--beautiful families, titled friends and lazy golden afternoons--make Angelenos want to pull out of the fast lane, stash the Mercedes-Benz with valet parking and buy into a piece of that genteel fantasy? Jerry Magnin and Polo/Ralph Lauren are banking on it. Since rhinestone-embellished sweats and a Body by Jake are components of a more typical Beverly Hills style than Shetland sweaters and sensible shoes, whom does Magnin envision as the Polo customer here?
“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” And that’s all Magnin wants to say for now.
