What Interviewing a Ralph Lauren Expert Taught Me About Fashion

Bridget Foley on six decades of Ralph Lauren, authenticity and world-building

May 14, 2026

There’s a moment I keep coming back to from this week’s episode of Let’s Get Dressed with WWD veteran and fashion journalist Bridget Foley.

We were talking about why Ralph Lauren — a brand that has been around for almost sixty years, that your dad probably wore, that your mom definitely wore, and is the brand Gen Z can’t stop posting about. And Bridget said something that I haven’t been able to get out of my head:

“Ralph never really wanted to be in fashion. Because if you’re in fashion, you’re going to be out of fashion.”

We are living in a moment where every brand is literally sprinting. New drops, new aesthetics, new “cores,” a new It-bag every six weeks. The pressure to be of the moment is so intense that most brands burn out trying to keep up. And in the middle of all of that, the brand having quite literally the loudest cultural moment with the youngest consumer in fashion right now is the one that has refused, almost on principle, to chase any of it.

I’ve been wanting to do a real brand deep dive on the show for a while, and Ralph Lauren felt like the perfect place to start. There’s just so much to learn from how he’s built this legacy. So consider this the first of (hopefully) many and please let me in the comments which brand you want us to cover next. I have a list, but I want to hear yours!!

1:50 How to build a world

Bridget has covered Ralph for decades as a former WWD editor. She has interviewed him more times than almost anyone alive. And she just wrote the text for the new Ralph Lauren book Catwalk — which, by the way, is going to live on my coffee table forever — and what struck me most about our conversation is how clearly she could articulate something we all love about the brand but can’t really put a name to.

Her argument is that Ralph Lauren is probably the most well-known designer aesthetic in the world. Not because of any one piece, or any one campaign, or any one celebrity moment — but because Ralph wasn’t ever building a fashion brand. He was building a world.

And the world includes everything. The black tie. The ripped jeans. The polo shirt. The military jacket. The leather thrown over denim. The Bridgehampton sunset show with multi-generational families running through a riding ring. The intimate craft show in a downtown gallery the very next season. The hardest reservation to get in NYC. All of it is instantly and undeniably Ralph.

This is what I think makes a brand last and thrive in today’s fashion market. The brands with longevity aren’t the ones who out-trend everyone else. They’re the ones who build a universe that we all get to play dress up in and want to be a part of on a daily basis.

And this is the same conversation we’ve been having all season, just in a different costume. It’s what Larissa and I talked about with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: discernment over copying, repetition over reinvention. It’s what Zac is doing right now with Gap Inc., turning storefronts into moments for everyone to partake in. The throughline is world-building. And Ralph has been quietly running that playbook since 1967. I guess when they say stay true to yourself, they really mean it!

What brands do you think are world-building well? A few that come to mind for me are Paige Lorenze’s Dairy Boy and KITH.

7:38 Contradiction is the point

One of the things Bridget kept returning to is that Ralph’s design ethos is built on contradiction, which is something I think we could all take into our daily style. Masculine and feminine. Rugged and refined. The tuxedo jacket thrown over a pair of jeans, which Ralph started doing decades before any of our current fav celebrities ever stepped on a red carpet looking like that.

Bridget actually told this story about how Ralph never loved the full tuxedo on himself. He’s not really a going-out guy — never was, even during peak Studio 54 era. But when he had to go to black tie events, he started showing up in a tux jacket and jeans. He felt like himself. It became iconic and it became Ralph Lauren.

That detail is so small and so important. Because the thing Ralph understood, before anyone else in American fashion did, is that real life is the contradiction. We don’t wake up the same person every day. We don’t leave the house for the same kind of room. We are always, in some sense, dressing for the role we are about to play. The genius isn’t picking one of those roles to design for. The genius is designing for all of them — and making it feel like one coherent person doing it. It’s why whenever we talk about cleaning out our closets, I recommend putting together a Pinterest board of vibes you love and never copying a single person. We’re never just one thing.

30:40 We all want a Polo ID <3

When I asked Bridget about how this brand has maintained its relevancy for 60 years, and not just relevancy, adoration across multiple generations, we began to chat about making all the right moves. I told Bridget that I don’t know a single Gen Z woman who doesn’t either own or want the Polo ID bag. I swear it’s in every other “what’s in my bag” video on my TikTok feed. It’s the bag that has, somehow, in 2026, become a totem of taste for a generation that wasn’t alive when Ralph put his first polo player on a shirt. Her response — “the greatest ideas in the world don’t matter if the product isn’t there.”

Genius in my opinion. To create a bag so chic but also under $1,000. I often talk about how we’re missing amazing bags at a mid-price range, and Ralph Lauren nailed it. It’s aspirational, but not completely unattainable. It’s no surprise the brand’s stock hit an all time high this spring.

But then there are, of course, the classics. The polo shirt is one of the most democratically beautiful pieces of clothing. It’s smart, it’s utilitarian. I can wear it. You can wear it. Your mom wore it. Your daughter will wear it. Yet none of us are wearing it the same way. Same thing with the cable knit sweater. There’s 1,000 ways to wear it, and none of us will do it the same.

32:58 Your POV will outlive any trend

I’ve thought a lot, this season about what makes a wardrobe feel like yours…

So many of our conversations on the podcast have inspired me recently. The CBK conversation, Erin Walsh, and now talking to Bridget brought kind of nailed it. It’s something Ralph has been quietly modeling for sixty years: know what you actually like, dress for the life you actually live, and repeat the things that make you feel like yourself without apology. My favorite interview Ralph has ever done was when we was wearing a plaid button down from K-Mart. K Mart!!!! A point of view will always outlast a trend cycle.

What's your Ralph Lauren moment? The runway show that lives in your head rent free, the piece you've had forever, the photo you've saved to a Pinterest board ten times…let me know in the comments and we can keep diving into the world of Ralph Lauren.

x Liv

Let's Get Dressed

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?