Ralph Lauren entered the trade in the early 1960s as a sales assistant at Brooks Brothers in New York, then moved through showroom and sales roles at glovemaker Daniel Hays and the necktie firm Beau Brummell.

It was at Beau Brummell in 1967 that he persuaded the owner to let him produce a line of wide, hand-stitched neckties under the name Polo, the licensing arrangement that became the seed of the company.

The method from the start was an American reading of English tailoring and Ivy League sportswear, oxford-cloth button-downs, cabled shetlands, tweed hacking jackets, and the wide silk tie cut against the slim 1960s norm.

Lauren incorporated Polo Fashions in 1968 and added womenswear in 1971, the year the polo player logo first appeared on the cuff of a women’s shirt. The clothes assembled a wardrobe of recurring objects, the camel polo coat, the cashmere fair isle, the prairie skirt over a lace petticoat, the chambray work shirt, the white tennis flannels, the navy double-breasted blazer with gilt buttons.

He won the Coty American Fashion Critics’ Award for menswear in 1970 and for womenswear in 1973, and dressed Robert Redford in tweeds for The Way We Were and Diane Keaton in vests and ties for Annie Hall, placing the label inside an Americana lineage that Bill Blass and Calvin Klein were working in parallel.

The 1986 opening of the Rhinelander Mansion on Madison Avenue, a four-floor restoration of the 1898 Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo house, fixed the retail grammar of mahogany, sporting prints, and silver frames that the company has used since.

Lauren remains executive chairman and chief creative officer of Ralph Lauren Corporation, having handed the chief executive role to Patrice Louvet in 2017 after Stefan Larsson’s departure. The fall-winter 2024 show in the Hamptons returned to the house vocabulary of cream cable-knits, suede fringed skirts, concho belts, and the Ricky bag in saddle leather, with denim and beadwork staged against a barn setting.

Six decades in, the argument of the work is consistent, a fictional American wardrobe assembled from English tailoring, western dress, and East Coast sport, sold now across a company with annual revenues above $6 billion.