Under the Influence: Vintage Ralph
Before the Polo Logo, There Was a Military Jacket and a Thrifted Scout Shirt
Ralph Lauren’s World
Ralph Lauren is one of the few American brands that built a full-blown fantasy and made it stick. You know it when you see it: the tweed, the cowboy, the Upper East Side heiress in riding boots. Every version of Ralph feels like it came from a place that existed long before the clothes themselves did.
But those worlds weren’t pulled out of thin air. They were built on vintage.
The Ralph Lauren aesthetic wasn’t just about designing new clothes. It was about curating a lifestyle from old ones. Ralph himself sourced vintage to set the tone early on. He surrounded his team with bomber jackets, Navajo rugs, Savile Row suits, and varsity knits—not for nostalgia, but because that’s where the ideas were. The past was the material. You can see it all over this FW2000 collection, or in the lineup from FW2002.
And John Wrazej made it work.
John Wrazej’s Role
As head of creative services, Wrazej wasn’t designing collections. He was shaping the brand’s whole world. He spent years collecting vintage to build Ralph Lauren’s internal archive, which became a reference library for everything the company touched. A Boy Scout shirt. A WWII flight jacket. A fisherman’s cable knit from Maine. He knew what felt RL before it had a tag. That instinct shaped not just the clothes, but the ads, shows, stores, catalogs… Everything. Like this FW2010 show, which looks like someone raided a perfectly preserved prep-school attic.
He basically styled the American dream with secondhand finds.
Greg Lauren’s Exit
Eventually the obsession with vintage spun off into other directions. One of them was Greg Lauren, Ralph’s nephew, who started out at the company but left to do his own thing. Instead of referencing vintage, Greg cut it up. His label is built from repurposed garments. Old fatigues, shredded flannels, worn-in denim. This SS2016 show pretty much sums up the vibe. The Ralph Lauren world, taken apart and sewn back together with the seams showing.
Feels fitting. Ralph turned vintage into a fantasy. Greg dragged it into something more raw.
Either way, it started in the same place. Someone digging through a pile of old clothes, looking for an idea. Someone pulling a wrinkled jacket off a hanger right now might be building the next Ralph-level brand without realizing it. Ideas don’t always come from moodboards. Sometimes they show up in the bottom of a bin.
Back to digging. That wrinkly blazer might launch your Ralph era.
❤︎ C
