Ralph Lauren Fall 2012
You have never seen the likes. At Ralph Lauren, the curtain was raised at the show, with the intention to speak, by the strains of the theme music to Downton Abbey. Instantly, the full audience was transported, misty-eyed, to watching PBS at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, not the Ralph Lauren show at 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning. Before Downton Abbey, we had Gosford Park, and before Gosford Park, we had Ralph Lauren, whose achingly romantic and lovingly nuanced idea of grand English country living has had a cinematic sweep that may give Downton and Gosford a run for his or her pounds, shilling, and pence. That era and locale was among the mainstays of Lauren’s career, turning the shooting parties and the candlelit dinners under the family Gainsboroughs into tweeds and Fair Isles, jodhpurs and hacking jackets, bias-cut slips and ravishing beaded flapper dresses of yore into clothes that have the capacity to speak to the past yet also live and breathe within the here and now-and all over the globe, at that.
All of those elements were in Ralph Lauren’s show. From the hole looks that married snappy masculine tailoring (blazers, trenches) in herringbone and houndstooth wools and Fair Isle sweaters in wonderful and original color combinations (this Scot is qualified to weigh in in this) with lean pants; the roomier, relaxed, yet masculine line of the outer layer worn with something lean underneath taps into one of the most key ideas about shape and form we’ve been seeing this week. What gave this an unexpected twist was using ocelot-print shearling within the mix, either for an off-the-cuff, shrug-it-on coat, or as a headscarf tucked into the neck of the sweater; a groovy and simple and highly covetable styling trick that truly caught the attention.
As the show progressed, events took a turn-by turns dark and dramatic and golden-hued and glamorous. (That certainly seems like a Downton narrative arc.) Lauren made the usage of black leather-another recurrent theme these past few days-for a pleated skirt sliced with sheer panels that were revealed when it moved, pairing it with a black sweater threaded with gold beads. However it was with the various closing, long evening looks that he reached a crescendo-columnar black velvet beaded on the neck, a wonderful undulation of gold-lamé pleats-that can take you somewhere just as magical as any episode of a cult British TV show playing on a Sunday night.
