Ralph Lauren’s Cozy Chic
Ralph Lauren has a new personal cause. He’s supporting a trend the advertising industry calls “new traditionalism.” It has to do with a renewed interest in family life, homespun values and all things American--something the folks at Polo think unlikely to go away, according to Mary Randolph Carter, vice president and director of advertising.
Carter works on the multi-page magazine ads for the new Polo Country collection, and recently spent a day in the Beverly Hills Polo Ralph Lauren shop, helping to launch the new country store there. It offers everything required for wholesome, rural life, from housewares to wearables, and it is the sixth such boutique Lauren has opened since spring.
“Maybe we’re fooling ourselves,” Carter says of the dungarees, work shirts and heavy hand-knits that carry the new Lauren label. “But they’re clothes that bespeak a mood of individuality, hospitality, having people over for a big country picnic. It’s a way of coping with a life that’s so pressured from Monday through Friday that we don’t have time to read a book.”
Carter oversees an annual advertising budget estimated somewhere between $20 million and $25 million. Yet she artfully achieves the look of a woman who spends her time baking pies. For the launch of the Beverly Hills country store, she dressed in a work shirt, white cotton jodhpurs, deck shoes and white socks. She shuns both jewelry and makeup.
She doesn’t have a Madison Avenue background either. As Carter, 45, would tell it, she’s basically a country girl from Virginia, the eldest of nine children, and now a wife and mother of two of her own, all of whom you can read about in her book, “American Family Style” ($35; Viking Studio). It’s a paean to Americana in which she uses her own clan as models and her parents’ rustic Virginia farm, Muskettoe Pointe, as a backdrop. Lauren contributed the foreword.
Of Polo’s current ruralism, Carter, formerly an editor at Mademoiselle and Self magazines, says: “Though I’d love to take credit, it’s totally coincidence. There are many people and films and books that inspire Ralph. He just felt a year ago that there was a spirit in this country--it was right before the presidential campaign--and there were a lot of things that spoke of America that he wanted to be a part of.”
While Lauren has always designed his share of informal, provincial clothing, Carter says: “I think he felt people were forgetting that part of what he believes in. Ralph comes to work often in dungarees and chambray shirts and has a home in the country, and he always projects where he is and what he loves.”
Along with country clothes, assorted collectibles such as antique quilts and folk art are all served up in the Beverly Hills store--as are old-fashioned red licorice sticks. Even Polo bedding has gone country: Pillowcases are cross-stitched; sheets and shams are available in blue chambray cotton, the same material used on the ubiquitous work shirts.
The accompanying ad campaign just launched in national magazines shows men, women and children wearing flannels and plaids against the backdrop of an old white farmhouse, photographed in early morning mist in Point Reyes, Calif. (Lauren refers to his storybook ads as “movies.”)
Although Carter is also responsible for ads showing the higher-priced, more formal “collection” clothes, which are usually photographed on estates resembling English manor houses, she admits a particular fondness for working on the country campaign.
“I now live in the city (Manhattan) and it’s a fight every day to recapture the life I had,” she explains. “I do it by surrounding myself with barriers to some awful realities out there. My apartment in New York looks like a log cabin. And when I leave the city and go off to my little house in the country, and put on my green rubber boots and make a pie and put on an apron, everything feels a little bit easier.”
