Opulence with a sense of soul: Ralph Lauren’s taste for history
For spring/summer 2027, Ralph Lauren revisited the codes of historical grandeur and recast them with faded glamour, ease and soul. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
A week ago, President Trump announced imminent plans to begin construction on his much-contested triumphal arch in Washington, DC. Renderings of the monstrosity are what we’ve come to expect from the man, who has also turned the Oval Office into a trashy Las Vegas hotel room: gilded, garish and gaudy; the holy trinity of the nouveau riche. Ralph Lauren is hardly from the old aristocracy, but unlike the commander-in-chief, he understands good taste. On Wednesday evening in New York City, the designer kicked off the spring/summer 2027 season with a collection that demonstrated how to do opulence with a sense of soul.
Presented in a stately hall in Tribeca, the proposal was pieced together from historical references. Their common denominators were glamour and opulence, but not in a straightforward way. Instead, Lauren imbued his old-world finds with a faded sensibility as if at once timeworn and modernised. A corset was transformed into a T-shirt, its brocade-like florals desaturated into whites. A pinstripe suit expanded into a skirt-like structure, its waistcoat adorned with a tattered lamé corsage. Jackets were cut into tailcoats, while robes and gowns were sun-faded like antique textiles, or indeed denim.
Lauren fused the rugged with the refined. The show was a way of cementing his own historical practice, but its most interesting aspect was the way he illustrated how different opulence can feel depending on how it’s done (and who does it). In contemporary times, displays of historical grandeur are often expressions of wistfulness for the elegance and order of eras gone by. Ironically – or perhaps tragicomically – that’s literally a counter-reaction to a current Trumpian zeitgeist of uncertainty and disarray. As Lauren demonstrated, grandeur is most seductive when it carries the patina of history, rather than the ambition to manufacture it.
Ralph Lauren kicked off the spring/summer 2027 season with a collection that demonstrated how to do opulence with a sense of soul. Presented in a stately hall in Tribeca, the proposal was pieced together from historical references. Their common denominators were glamour and opulence, but not in a straightforward way. Instead, Lauren imbued his old-world finds with a faded sensibility as if at once timeworn and modernised.
ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN
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