These days the Ralph Lauren label of interest is Rugby, but I’m looking for another label.  One before the attempts at high end European fashion with the Black and Purple labels. One going all the way back to Marc Jacobs attempts at grunge chic.  One Ralph Lauren used unconventional methods to sell to adolescents who were supposed to be so oh so, anti-materialistic in the early nineties.  I am looking for RRL.

This label is extremely hard to find.  Back in the day you could easily find it in any department store, though there was a small sampling of the goods a tenth of the size of the Polo boutiques, but it was there.  That lasted for about a few years and then the label all but dissapeared.  Then it was back to Polo, oh yeah, that boring Polo label again, and then of course the other labels began to proliferate and Ralph Lauren just didn’t have the chic that it used to have at that time.

Ralph Lauren is an odd label.  It isn’t fashionable at all, in fact it stands for everything that fashion does not.  The fit is always right, but while other labels strive to be “clean”, and well polished, Ralph Lauren always gave you a rugged, broken in look.  RRL took this concept to the extreme as he dredged up old looks from like the twenties and thirties.  It was a nice prewar (World War II) look.  At the time he suggested that the label was meant to evoke the novelty of searching for nameless goods from a thrift store.

I never got that explanation, it never resonated with me.  Thrift stores where I’m at sell old FUBU, Polo, DKNY, I even found what must have been a Christian Dior shirt from like 1982 in there once.  I never saw anything the likes of what RRL offered.  While Whites did the grunge thing in the early nineties we had work clothing, it wasn’t anything like the jet set “shiny suit” thing that happened when we spent our hard earned money on (alli)gators.  It was a nice look; the decade before was lost in Fendi and Troop.  It was a pretentious ghetto high-end look, this was down to earth, like Run DMC, it worked for us.

The problem with making money though, is that if you are going to look trashy, with that authentic look, it has to be done right.  It has to be in your soul, in your spirit, and it helps if you are doing other equally unglamorous, downright pedestrian stuff, with your time to pull that look off.  You have to be Joe the Plumber essentially, just with a lot of money.

Yet in the early nineties a lot of people were doing just that.  That was a time when the rich had what they had, and the poor had what they had, before the rich started aggressively marketing to the poor and diluting their own goods, which is what happened to Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger in the late nineties.  If you wanted to be agrarian, there was nothing wrong with it and people left you up to your own devices; it was nothing like today where we’re caught up in the latest interpretation of ultraviolent loud colors early eighties pastel pastiche.  It was real fashion, real honest and geniune.

I’ve spent years trying to get those Miami Vice colors at bargain prices, yet have turned a corner.  Colors themselves do not make fashion, not at all.  It goes back to a way to convey how you feel inside.  Do not get me wrong, I have no intentions at all to go back to being either a Ralph Lauren or a Dolce and Gabbana devote.  Not even Christian Dior; all of that stuff had it’s place in the twentieth century but none of it has really been of any relevance in the last 5 years. 

I am not going to drive up the Hamptons in search of a RRL store.  Surely, if I were to find it online it would be on Ebay just to pay a small fortune for it there either (in comparison to what I can get from someone else I would actually wear for any real length of time), so I am stuck.  But if I were to ever run across it in a thrift store, or it resurfaced at a department store again, I would have to take a second look.  Because as much as I feel that I am over Ralph Lauren this is the one label that had some integrity to it that wasn’t plastered all over the place.  It made a huge splash in 1993 and then sort of dissapeared into the night.  The last time I saw someone wearing it must have been on television when someone was attending a vigil for those killed in the World Trade Center attacks.

A plaid wool coat would be nice right about now, as would some of those selvage jeans.  No way in hell I am going to pull out the chambray work shirts again.  I had a pair of pinstripped cotton pants with a herringbone pattern on them.  Wore the hell out of those pants, and got a few compliments on them as well.  I was a lot smaller then, but those pants were worth the $20 I paid.

Truth is you’re hard pressed to convince someone to pay $200 for something that is all but destroyed right now and Ralph Lauren knows it.  RRL will continue to be difficult to find, and the only stores you may find would be in places like the Hamptons where they have a geniune appreciation for the lifestyle that RRL evokes.  Tom Hanks wore some RRL garb on a magazine cover back in the day, the sweatshirt was like $200; a true classic though like much of Ralph’s work someone would probably pay $200 for it today, even more if they knew he was remotely involved in modeling it …