Ralph Lauren on dressing Hillary Clinton, growing up in the Bronx - and meeting the Queen in Bloomingdales

The latter may only be two years old, but like everything in the Lauren universe it represents a continuum of good taste. Roaring log fires, the studied eclecticism of Turkish rugs and Native American influences, tartan and lashings of equestrian references – these have become generics, in much the same way as Colefax and Fowler or shabby chic. And of course there are the clothes.

Hillary Clinton wore Ralph Lauren regularly during her residential campaign. Lauren worked with her on sleek-ifying those pantsuits, notably the purple-lapelled one she wore to concede – in a speech that will surely go down in feminist history. ‘I didn’t know the significance of that colour,’ he admits (purple being a livery of the suffragette movement). ‘But Hillary’s people did. I just knew it looked beautiful on her.’

Although I have been asked by Lauren’s people not to dwell on politics, it is surely of note that Melania Trump also wore his clothes during her husband’s campaign – most strikingly a £3,175 white jumpsuit at the victory party. Mrs Trump bought off the rack.

From this, one may be able to deduce Lauren’s political allegiances, but the salient point is that both women turned to the designer at a key moment.

Donald Trump too, Lauren tells me with a ‘que sera’ expression, is a regular of the uptown stores. Ralph Lauren taste is an incontrovertible article of faith it seems. Or, as Oprah Winfrey put it, ‘How did I, a poor girl from rural Mississippi, come to equate monetary success with owning rows of white Ralph Lauren bath sheets?’

It started with ties

It is almost half a century since a 28-year-old Ralph Lauren dragged his vision – or more specifically a rack of ties – along 59th Street to Bloomingdale’s. He didn’t make the sale immediately. They wanted him to sell the ties under the brand Sutton East – a nod, presumably, to Sutton Place, an exclusive New York district.

He was desperate for the contract, but not that desperate, and declined. It would be his name on the ties, or nothing. The self-belief was always there. ‘I don’t know where it came from,’ he says in his soft lilt, ‘but I knew what I was doing was good because I wanted to wear it.’ He makes it sound simple. He makes everything sound simple. He may be the most intuitive designer I’ve ever interviewed.

We are in Lauren’s suite of offices, which lead off a double-height, galleried hall (more wood, leather chesterfields, oil paintings and portraits of beloved family dogs). Outside, New Yorkers are jittery. In here is serenity. We could be in a castle in Inverness rather than on the sixth floor of his Madison Avenue HQ.

His innermost sanctum is a delirious medley of his favourite things. Packed bookcases and squishy sofas I’d anticipated, and even the model shiny black vintage Bugatti (as a classic-car collector of some repute, he also owns the life-size version).

But not the teeny leather shoes lining a desk that doesn’t look often-used (it’s not – ‘I’ve never been a desk worker,’ Lauren says), the deluxe leather-trimmed bicycle, or the twin teddy bears holding court on the coffee table. One wears a tuxedo and cowboy boots. The other, in denim, is aping what Lauren has on today, minus the ancient leather jacket the designer has layered over his denim. It is a genuinely old jacket, he clarifies. Not some artfully distressed one.

Everywhere you look are the famous. Photos of Lauren with Bill Clinton. With Diana, Princess of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge (Lauren is a benefactor of The Royal Marsden hospital in London, of which the Duke, like his mother before him, is president), Nancy Reagan (they bonded when he sat next to her at a White House dinner and discovered her father was a surgeon; he’d just recovered, in his late-40s, from a brain tumour). And look! The Queen.

He was presented to Her Majesty when she visited Bloomingdale’s. ‘I don’t know how they got her. But there she was, looking at my stuff… She just couldn’t understand why I was selling tartan.’ The Queen put her finger on something that has puzzled many industry experts over the decades.

How did this child of Eastern European immigrants, brought up in the Bronx with his nose firmly pressed up against the outside of Wasp America, come to embody it? ‘I only ever absorbed the styles I loved,’ he says. As for how he was able to sell baronial style to the Scots and preppy-dom to Ivy League-ers? ‘Maybe because they themselves didn’t realise what they had.’

Lauren’s ability to sniff out the positive meant he detected the oncoming mania for an aristocratic aesthetic several years before the likes of Brideshead, and developed an androgynous women’s look that just about pre-empted Annie Hall, which used some of his clothes for Diane Keaton’s much-imitated wardrobe.

‘I’ve always been able to feel the vibrations and the pulse of the world out there,’ he once said. Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, androgyny and effete English aristos were not really an issue. ‘There was almost an absence of taste at home,’ he says.

His father, an artist who painted houses when times were tough, and his mother, a homemaker, with three sons and a daughter to feed and educate, were not the types to plump up stripy cushions on their bed – had they possessed any, which they didn’t – because as the world knows the Art of the Bed was another Ralph Lauren invention.

The thing about the Lauren boys, or Lifshitz, as they were (and no, the name change wasn’t a rejection of his Jewishness, but ‘because it contained the word “shit”’ and, as he has sensibly asked, would you buy a product with that name?), was that they were handsome. Lauren wanted to look good to pull the girls. He never really thought he was going to be a fashion designer, ‘wasn’t really aware of their existence’.

When Ralph met Ricky

Initially he studied at a yeshiva, a religious Jewish school, but at 16 he found a Saturday job in a clothes store and styled himself ‘sort of preppy’, based on the endless movies he saw and the books he read. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn – these were his idols.

‘I always had a sense of glamour and what it should look like.’ What he didn’t know was how it should feel. That came later, when ‘silks and wools would come in from Europe, and I would touch them’, he says. ‘There wasn’t anything like that being made in America at that time. We were good at sportswear, but we didn’t have craft or a real sense of luxury. There was a lot of polyester.’

By now he had met Ricky, a beautiful blonde with Austrian parents, whom he married when he was 25 and she was 19. They decorated their first apartment, a $90-a-month shoebox in the Bronx, ‘with brown corduroy divans and orange director shelves. My father painted the walls to look like wood.’

No absence of taste, then, merely of money. And that soon changed. Pretty soon the Laurens moved to an apartment in Manhattan, followed in due course by an early 20th-century manor in Bedford, New York, a beach house in Montauk, a shuttered retreat in Jamaica, and a 17,000-acre ranch in Colorado, each interior reflecting a wholehearted appreciation of its setting.

It doesn’t bother him a jot that his homes, lavishly featured, along with the Laurens themselves, in many magazines over the years, may have been diligently replicated around the globe. ‘They’ll all look slightly different… It’s been kind of cool to feature in the ad campaigns, especially when people come over and say how much they love the clothes. I wasn’t pretending to be something in those ads. That’s the way I am.’

If he hadn’t become a designer, he thinks he might have found his way to being an advertiser – the Don Draper kind who turned the mechanical act of selling into a narrative about identity.

The art of family

The evolution of his brand is his biography as well as America’s. He launched childrenswear after Ricky returned from a shopping trip disheartened by the poor-quality kids’ clothes on offer (polyester again). Womenswear was another reflex, because he wanted Ricky to be dressed in the kind of clothes they both liked – relaxed, understated and timeless, ‘not too try-hard’, he says.

The entire family still wears his clothes most of the time. ‘I don’t make them. But I like that they do.’ They are extremely close – on the way out I meet his son David, husband to George W Bush’s niece Lauren Bush and the company’s chief innovation officer and vice chairman. The art of family was something Lauren did inherit from his parents.

According to Lauren’s telling, it all – business, family, multiple accolades – proceeded without a bump. In 1983, he acquired the lease on the Rhinelander, a magnificent 19th-century Edith-Wharton-esque mansion in Manhattan.

Lauren lavished what was widely reported to be $15 million on restoring its 20,000sq ft to glory, filling its rooms with his ever-proliferating lines, 19th-century oil paintings and cases of antique jewellery. In a Wharton novel this would have been an act of fabulous hubris, but the store thrived. He opened an equally grand womenswear shop across the road.

Drifting between the room-sets of these two vast emporia – this one’s a bit Scottish baronial, that one’s more your modern-ski-chalet aesthetic – you could almost forget you were in an actual shop. ‘You know how you go to some museums and think, “I wish I could buy that?”’ Lauren says.

Almost everything, including a futuristic-looking black pool table (yours for $69,000) is for sale – apart from the cornicing, and that you could probably get replicated if you dropped by the suite of rooms dedicated to Ralph Lauren Home. It strikes me in 2016, when a jumpy fashion industry is constantly debating the importance of creating an experience for the retail consumer, that Lauren got there decades ago.

I wonder what he hears now, when he takes the world’s pulse. ‘Nervousness. These are difficult times. I think that means that certain core institutions, like the preppy, are as relevant as ever.’ Touché. The past two years have been, to put it mildly, challenging for the Ralph Lauren behemoth.

Sales have slowed recently. There have been some 1,700 layoffs amid murmurings that there are too many ranges in the empire. The customer is confused, runs this argument, and weary of the preppy shtick. There is too vast a disconnect between the gorgeous gloss of the campaigns and the Rhinelander, and the out-of-town outlets selling those polo shirts…If anything, Lauren seems reinvigorated by this latest twist. This, after all, is a man who says his immediate response to being diagnosed with that tumour was ‘to work harder’.

Adjusting to a new era

A year ago he hired Stefan Larsson, an alumnus of Old Navy and H&M, as CEO. The only previous occupant of that role was Lauren himself. ‘I realised there were things I couldn’t do. This is a seven-billion-a-year company. The industry has changed so much. The internet is complicated. I met Stefan and we clicked immediately.’

Together, Lauren and Larsson have embarked on an ambitious turnaround, ‘streamlining the business, getting rid of lines we shouldn’t have, making the core stronger’. They have launched Icons, a 40-piece collection of Ralph-ified perennials – impeccable women’s tuxedos, double-breasted tweed coats and suede jackets.

They’re also opening more Polo Ralph Lauren stores like the one facing Trump Tower and the new flagship on London’s Regent Street. These mid-priced yet aspirational honeytraps are part of a strategy to build a bridge between the seductive swank of the Rhinelander and those polo shirts. Not, Lauren says, ‘that the polo shirt was ever all there was to the business’.

There may be more Ralph Lauren restaurants (there is also one in Paris, and in Chicago), because the other thing the vibrations are telling him is that in troubled times, food is always a safe bet. There could be hotels. And then there is the audacious ‘see now, buy now’ strategy, implemented with full braggadocio at his New York Fashion Week show in September, outside the uptown women’s store.

For a couple of hours, a section of Madison Avenue was closed off while an audience of editors and celebrities watched Stella Tennant, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and co modelling a collection that went on sale moments after the show ended. That, Lauren agrees, was a ta-da moment.

But this radical upending of the normal industry structure sounds like a logistical nightmare. ‘Yes, but it wasn’t horrible. It was exciting, like turning round to the industry and saying, “Look, we can still do it.” It’s early days, but it’s better than putting the clothes out then waiting six months before you can sell them while other people knock you off.’

In other words, he’s ready for it. At 77, he’s still happily married (Ricky’s waiting downstairs for him so they can go out for dinner), works out daily, still rides… ‘Still?’ he stops me. ‘Why do you say still?’ Because I’ve given up, I tell him. Too scared. ‘So’s Ricky,’ he says, regretfully. ‘But the truth is, you have to keep getting back on that horse.’