At sixteen, he changed his name. Ralph Lifshitz and his brother Jerry became Ralph and Jerry Lauren, the surname shed partly due to school bullying and partly, one suspects, for the distance it created between a Bronx apartment and the world on screen. A name is the first garment anyone wears, and Lauren understood this before he understood much else about the industry he was about to build. The new name belonged to someone slightly ahead of him. He spent the rest of his life catching up to it.

By 1967 he was twenty-eight, working for a tie manufacturer called Beau Brummell out of an office in the Empire State Building. He kept his stock in a chest of drawers. Standard neckties that year were narrow, dark, and forgotten by the time they hit the floor of a changing room. Lauren's were wide, handmade from high-quality fabrics, and priced at fifteen dollars in a market where the average tie sold for five. His boss told him the world wasn't ready for Ralph Lauren. Lauren recalled later that he heard this as a compliment.

Bloomingdale's initially refused the ties, telling him to make something narrower, something closer to what men were already buying. He declined. The ties sold half a million dollars' worth in their first year to Paul Stuart, Neiman Marcus, and eventually Bloomingdale's, which revised its position once the wide tie caught on. By 1969 Lauren held the first designer boutique ever given to a single name inside a Bloomingdale's floor. He had the concept before the infrastructure, as usual.

The name he chose for the line was Polo. His brother Jerry had suggested it; Lauren loved it immediately. Polo was a sport he had never played, a world of English summers and silver cups that existed for him, as for most Americans, entirely in the imagination. He acknowledged later that Basketball would have suggested something closer to his actual background. Polo suggested the world on the screen. The choice was not accidental and was not innocent, and Lauren knew both things.

What followed across the next two decades was worldbuilding before the term existed. When he dressed Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby in 1974, the costumes filtered the twenties through Lauren's imagination until the decade bore his own specific fingerprints. Three years later, Diane Keaton wore what she and Lauren assembled for Annie Hall, and the resulting look entered American culture as something apparently timeless and vaguely remembered. Lauren was dressing fictional characters in clothes designed to outlast the films, and the confusion between character and costume was entirely the point. He wanted the clothes to feel like they had always existed. He made sure they did.

By 1986 the flag had been planted in the most physical way possible. Lauren opened his flagship in the Rhinelander Mansion on Madison Avenue, a Gilded Age building of the kind constructed by families whose names his grandparents would never have known. Inside, the space was arranged as an estate rather than a retail floor. Antlers. Tartan. Polo mallets resting in stands. Aged leather, darkened wood, the careful assembly of objects that suggested a private home belonging to a family that had accumulated rather than purchased. American buyers walked through it as though walking into something they had always vaguely remembered, which was accurate in a way, because what they were remembering was a composite assembled from a hundred films, novels, and inherited assumptions about what a certain kind of life looked like when it was lived well.

The brands multiplied across separate mythologies. Polo Ralph Lauren addressed the Ivy League fantasy. Purple Label worked through European tailoring tradition. RRL, named for Lauren's ranch in Colorado and spoken aloud as Double RL, inhabited the American West, its denim worn to softness by ranch hands who had been imagined rather than employed. Each world was internally complete and deliberately fabricated. The fabrication was the product.

There is a category of criticism that calls Lauren's work imitative. The argument runs that he borrowed from existing worlds rather than building his own. What the argument misses is the editing. The England of the Rhinelander Mansion never produced quite those rooms. The New England of the Polo shirt never quite assembled those lawns. The Wyoming of RRL never wore exactly those jackets with quite that degree of weathering. Lauren assembled references from cinema, fiction, and the visual grammar of class aspiration and arranged them into something with more emotional coherence than any of the originals. He edited reality until it became better than reality, then priced it at fifteen dollars a tie and rising.

His critics also misread what his customers were purchasing. Buying a garment is buying the life a garment implies, and Lauren built the implied life first, with extraordinary specificity, and let the clothes follow as evidence of it. This was the reverse of how fashion design was typically described, and it was also why Lauren consistently outpaced designers who were technically his superiors. He understood desire before he understood fabric.

When asked directly about the apparent contradiction of his biography, a Jewish boy from the Bronx building prep school mythology for a living, he answered once with the kind of directness that arrives only after the same question has been asked for thirty years. Does it have to do with class and money, he said. It has to do with dreams. The answer is also a description of the mechanism. He built a world that never existed out of a longing precise enough, and sustained for long enough, that it eventually began to feel like memory.