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Often Lauren finds what he wants right under his nose. One of his first women's tennis dresses was reportedly a takeoff on an old Hunter College gym suit that his wife kept around the apartment. (The designer met his wife Ricky, a former schoolteacher, in 1964 on a visit to a New York City eye doctor's office, where she was working part time. They were married six months later.) Lauren took the inspiration for the ruby red glass bottles that contain his women's cologne, called Lauren, from his favorite antique inkwells. He solicits advice from his daughter Dylan, a seventh-grader, who suggested that rather than resemble private-school uniforms, Lauren's girlswear should contain more bright stripes and colors. A visitor to Polo's office once found Lauren and his brother Jerry, 51, huddled over the latest L.L. Bean catalog, sketching items they liked.
As a result of that assiduousness, Lauren has been criticized as being a promoter rather than a designer, a copycat who turns traditional ideas into high-priced knock-offs. Case in point: his lined dungaree jacket with corduroy collar, a $98 rendering of an item that sells for about $35 with the Lee blue- jean label. Yet what Lauren is accused of taking from tradition is & systematically reborrowed from him by dozens of his smaller competitors.
His co-optation of American culture has got him into trouble on occasion. When he called an expensive jacket the Astaire during the early 1970s, the dancer asked Polo to stop using the name. Lauren complied. He stirred protests from folk-art preservationists in 1982 when he took a fancy to antique quilts and decided to cut up hundreds of them to decorate skirts and other garments in his contemporary collection.
Lauren delegates most of his company's day-to-day financial oversight to his only co-owner, Polo President Peter Strom, 57, who holds 10% of the stock. When Lauren wants to embark on a new venture, it is Strom's job to calculate what prices they would need to charge and how many items they would have to sell to break even. The huge profits from certain staple items, such as Polo shirts (see box), give Lauren the freedom to expand into riskier products. Example: at any given time Lauren may offer 60 styles of sweaters in his collections, which will include a number of designs that he especially likes but that will sell too few copies, perhaps only 200 or so, to make a profit. Says Strom: "The manufacturer doesn't even want to make them, but Ralph loves the way they look, so we go with them."
Lauren is acutely profit conscious. But since the only shareholders he needs to please are himself and Strom, he has leeway to experiment and to pursue a sometimes whimsical strategy. "I don't have a master plan," he says. "It gets more complicated as it grows." So far, Lauren's whimsy has been highly accurate in locating successful commercial opportunities. Says Strom: "I had no idea it would go like this. I remember saying to myself, 'If this business ever hits $20 million, I'll retire.' But I keep upping the stakes."