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Lauren spent a hefty $17 million on advertising last year, but Klein spent that much to promote just one of his products, Obsession perfume. The difference in selective vs. saturation campaigning is partly explained by the fact that the competing designers have each staked out an individual theme: status vs. sex. Klein's dominance of the sexual sell began with his blue-jeans ads in 1980, which featured a pubescent Brooke Shields uttering, "You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing!" His current magazine ad for Obsession depicts a young man nuzzling a bare-breasted female. By contrast, Lauren's most ambitious effort was a magisterial 18-page section in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year that portrayed a large, wealthy and blue-blooded American clan enjoying a life of racquets, books and, yes, polo. The pictorial saga reached out to upwardly mobile consumers with "Come join us" rather than "Hey, you! Buy these pants!" In essence, the Lauren approach dangles old-money prestige in front of a new-money clientele.
For Lauren, this year has provided one success after another. Aside from all the store openings, his fall women's collection was a smash hit. At the clothing's initial showing in the Grand Ballroom of Manhattan's Pierre Hotel, Lauren watched through a peephole backstage and his tawny-haired wife sat in the front row, wearing an ornately crested Polo blazer, as models taxied along the runway to the strains of Sinatra's The Lady Is a Tramp. The critical favorite of the day: a navy blue cashmere evening dress ($998) that was far more clingy, streamlined and sensuous than any Lauren has dared before. Another hit: a paisley skirt in shimmering panne velvet ($698), a striking companion piece to a sedate wool jacket ($598). Said Lauren after the show: "It all came together. This is the best I've ever felt."
Lauren's clothes generally pay homage to the kind of serene, idealized upper-class social milieu that the designer may have longingly imagined as a big-city youth. Lauren grew up in the 1940s and '50s in the Bronx's middle- class Mosholu Parkway section, the youngest of three boys and a girl born to Frank and Frieda Lifshitz. His father, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant from the Soviet city of Minsk, was a talented mural painter whose rendering of the Manhattan skyline still decorates the ceiling of a furriers' building lobby in the garment district.
Young Ralph was preoccupied with basketball, stickball and the exploits of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, but he started showing a flair for clothes in his early teens. "The kids I grew up with were wearing leather motorcycle jackets like Marlon Brando," he recalls. "But at the same time I saw there was a collegiate side of the world. I was inspired by it. I was always very preppie." Klein remembers that Lauren cut a distinctive figure in the neighborhood by mixing olive-drab Army clothes with tweeds. At 15, Ralph got his first fashion commission: to design red satin warm-up jackets for his baseball team.