DAVID LAUREN: GALLANTLY STREAMING
This article was first published in Issue 19, December 2011
Amusingly, David Lauren, the third and youngest child of Ralph and Ricky Lauren, learned the extent of his father’s influence on American culture only when he went to college. He explains: “When I went to Duke University, I had a moment of epiphany, where I saw the vast cultural impact of my father’s vision. Here at this southern college, people from all 50 states were wearing the clothes he designed. What was incredible was that many of them didn’t realise that there was an actual person named Ralph Lauren. The greatest compliment they paid him was that they thought Ralph Lauren was an institution that had been around for more than a hundred years. This was something really extraordinary. One of my father’s objectives has always been in the creation of things that, because of their quality and style, get better with time. But this went beyond our products and spoke of the true power of our brand and my father’s vision.”
As Lauren tried to explain the relative youth of his family’s brand, he began to realise how deeply embedded Ralph Lauren was in the collective consciousness of his peers. “I was trying to explain to them that when we were all kids, the company had just started, and they couldn’t believe it,” he says. “They felt somehow that their parents and even their grandparents had worn Ralph Lauren. This was an important moment because it gave me an all new perspective and respect for something that had been so familiar to me, something I had grown up with all my life.” What Lauren realised was that his father’s brand had somehow transcended time itself and achieved a level of unassailable permanence in American minds.
In Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, infants develop a sense of permanence — that objects and people continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard or touched — before the age of two. In other words, children learn that even though certain things are no longer in their line of vision, they still exist. But it’s quite another achievement to create a brand that feels like it has always been there, because, in the luxury world, brand permanence is often fabricated through advertising and marketing: smoke and mirrors. But Ralph Lauren has transcended this and come to symbolise that which is the very best in American craftsmanship: style and morality.
So it must have come as a shock to Ralph Lauren when his son David — the child who always seemed most synergistically connected to the universe he had created — stated emphatically upon graduating from one of America’s finest universities that he did not want to join his father’s business.
David Lauren is slim and elegant, with a quiet confidence, an intellectual intensity and a rather profound tenacity
