How Ralph built the fortune
Ralph Lauren built his fortune by selling an idea of American style as much as by selling clothes. In 1967, while working for a tie maker, he began designing ties that were wider and more colorful than the narrow styles then in fashion, sold them under the name Polo and persuaded Bloomingdale's to carry them. The following year he founded his own company with financial backing and expanded into a full menswear collection.
He moved quickly beyond menswear. A women's line followed in 1971, along with the polo player logo that would become the company's best known symbol. Fragrances arrived in 1978, and the Polo shirt, introduced in the early 1970s, became a long lasting best seller. Lauren pioneered the idea of a lifestyle brand, building in store shops that presented clothing, furniture and home goods together as a coherent world, an approach that later became standard across the fashion industry.
His flagship store in the restored Rhinelander Mansion on Madison Avenue, opened in 1986, demonstrated that vision on a grand scale. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997, and Lauren kept control through a class of shares with extra voting power. Most of his wealth is tied to that stake, supplemented by dividends and decades of share sales.
Companies and holdings
Ralph Lauren Corporation sells through its own stores, department stores, licensing partners and online. Its main lines include:
- Ralph Lauren Collection and Purple Label, the high end women's and men's collections.
- Polo Ralph Lauren, the core brand for shirts, knitwear and casual wear.
- Lauren Ralph Lauren and other lines sold at lower price points.
- Ralph Lauren Home, fragrances licensed to L'Oréal and a small group of restaurants, including the Polo Bar in New York.
Lauren is executive chairman and chief creative officer. Patrice Louvet has been chief executive since 2017. Outside the company, Lauren owns ranch property in Colorado and homes in New York and Jamaica, and he has assembled a celebrated collection of classic cars.
Early life and career
Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz in October 1939 in the Bronx, New York, the youngest of four children of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. His father was a house painter and artist. As a teenager he worked after school to buy clothes he admired, and he and his brother changed the family surname to Lauren when he was 16.
He studied business at Baruch College in Manhattan but left before graduating, served in the US Army reserve in the early 1960s and then worked as a sales clerk at Brooks Brothers and as a salesman for glove and tie companies. Those jobs gave him an understanding of traditional tailoring and of how department store buyers think, two themes that run through his later career. He married Ricky Low-Beer in 1964, and their three children have worked in or alongside the business.
Philanthropy and public life
Lauren's best known philanthropic project is health care in Harlem. In 2003 he founded the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention, created after the death of a close friend from cancer, to provide screening and treatment to underserved communities in partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering. The company's Pink Pony Fund supports cancer care programs in many countries. He also helped fund the restoration of the Star Spangled Banner flag at the Smithsonian in the late 1990s.
He has received several national honors. Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019, and in January 2025 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His automobile collection has been exhibited at major museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Louvre's decorative arts museum in Paris.
Lauren remains involved in design and presentation of the company's collections and is known for preferring to communicate through his work rather than through interviews. His long tenure is unusual in fashion, where founders often lose control of the houses they started. More than half a century after the first ties, he still controls the company that bears his name, and its imagery of Ivy League campuses, Western ranches and English country houses has shaped how many people around the world picture American style.