Polo Ralph Lauren

Originally Polo, Polo Ralph Lauren is the line Ralph Lauren launched in 1967 in New York with a collection of men’s neckties, expanding into his first full menswear collection the following year. The name came from the sport, chosen for its associations with English country leisure and old American money, and it has framed the label’s reference points ever since.

From its first season, Polo expanded beyond ties into shirts, sport coats, slacks, and suits, pulling roughly equally from British country dress, Ivy League tailoring, and American sportswear. The 1972 cotton mesh Polo shirt, with its small embroidered pony logo, became the line’s signature garment and one of the most recognizable pieces of American clothing produced in the twentieth century.

The vocabulary has stayed consistent across five decades. Oxford-cloth button-downs, cricket sweaters, tweed sport coats, cable knits, chinos, repp-stripe ties, tartan trousers, and the recurring nautical and equestrian motifs all run through the line season after season.

Polo sits in the middle of Ralph Lauren Corporation’s price ladder, below Purple Label tailoring and the runway Collection, and above the diffusion lines that followed. Its department store presence, especially through Bloomingdale’s and later Macy’s and Nordstrom, gave the label a national reach that few American designer brands have matched.

Polo Sport launched in 1992 as a performance and casual offshoot, sitting closer to the streetwear conversation that the Lo Lifes had already opened up in Brooklyn.

The line’s cultural footprint is wider than its retail position suggests. Hip-hop adopted Polo through the 1990s, from Raekwon and the Wu-Tang Clan to Kanye West’s later College Dropout-era styling, and the vintage Polo market that grew out of that adoption is now a substantial collector economy of its own.

Country club shoppers and Brooklyn collectors browse the same archive, often looking for the same Snow Beach pullover or 1992 stadium jacket. That double readership is the position Polo has occupied longer than any other American menswear label, and the line continues to produce new versions of its core pieces while reissuing pieces from its archive for the collectors who track them by year.