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More often, Lauren manages to find a lucrative combination of what he likes and what will sell, a spectrum that has ranged from Polo shirts to his Santa Fe collection. In terms of his standing in the industry, he has become fashion's equivalent of an old-time movie mogul who creates, directs and lives out his own view of high style. Lauren possesses the financial and personal clout to put his name on just about any product, or roomful of products, he pleases.
No matter how diverse they become, Lauren's wares reflect a rigid design philosophy, a kind of "Polo Manifesto" that his advertising brochures proclaim as "originality, but always with integrity and a respect for tradition." His newest venture, coming this fall, is a line of upholstered furniture ranging from $535 ottomans to $5,500 sofas. "I want to make all the things I love," he says. "A lot of people have nice taste. I have dreams."
To sell his vision of the lush life, Lauren is building an ever larger retail network. The designer now sells his products in 48 franchised Polo shops, 132 department store boutiques and 16 discount outlets. In April he opened what his company calls the world's largest one-designer store, Polo/ Ralph Lauren, in a 20,000-sq.-ft. renovated mansion on Manhattan's tony Madison Avenue shopping strip. The Polo palace, which is the first retail store Lauren has owned outright, represents a gamble that one designer can produce enough strong-selling goods to support a department store-size emporium.
If Lauren's new flagship store succeeds, other big-name designers will want to follow his example. The reason: compared with selling through department stores and franchises, direct ownership gives a designer complete creative control of marketing, not to mention a far higher profit margin. Says Walter Loeb, who follows the retailing industry for Morgan Stanley, the investment firm: "Designers are not always happy with the way department stores select merchandise, picking some pieces but not the whole assortment. The designers feel that the stores don't fully appreciate their genius and wish they would pick a range that reflects their total fashion message."
Lauren has gone multinational, a feat that many European designers achieved decades ago but that their U.S. counterparts have never quite managed to duplicate on the same scale. In the same month that he opened his Madison Avenue mansion for business, Lauren unveiled a grand salon in Paris. Says Patrick McCarthy, editor of Women's Wear Daily: "He is the first American designer to seize the potential for the American look in Europe."
This month Lauren, who has stores bearing his name in London, Hong Kong and Montreal, is opening another shop, in Munich. Next year he aims to establish two stores in Japan, where he sold $90 million worth of clothes through department stores in 1985, an 18% gain over the previous year. Lauren's popularity among the Japanese, whose appetite for U.S. styles and trends seems inexhaustible, has helped bring a new word to the native language: Ame- toraddo, for American traditional.