He runs his own billion-dollar company,
grew up in a middle-class neighborhood
where the high school was an archetypal blue-collar 50’s grease-era institution,
and he started his business relying on
his belief in his ability to turn normal
schmucks into people who looked and
felt like the world’s elite.
Every day in the late 1950s, young Ralph Lifshitz did a double-take
as he passed import car dealer showrooms on his pedestrian New
York City commute to his job selling ties at Brooks Brothers. His
car-nut side developed as he hoofed his way through Manhattan,
passing Jaguar and Morgan shops at a time when not many places
in the U.S. had those rare imports on display. He thought the cars
were beautiful.
He was so smitten by post-war sports cars he actually purchased
a Morgan while still a working stiff in car-unfriendly New York City,
then sold it because he couldn’t afford to park it. The loss of the
off-white Morgan drop-top was one of many tough breaks for the
budding clothes marketing genius. Then, in the late 1970s, he finally
started buying the cars he loved.
Ralph Lauren, who changed his last name because he was teased
about it in school, bought the cars he liked to drive them as commuter cars. Time magazine once quoted him about his name change:
“My given name has the word ‘shit’ in it,” he told Time. “When I was
a kid, the other kids would make a lot of fun of me. It was a tough
name. That’s why I decided to change it.”
After the Morgan he bought a Mercedes 280SE -- never mind
the impracticality of a soft-top car in New York City. Then he consecutively bought two Porsche 930s as get-to-work machines, not knowing these turbocharged supercars would become the nearly unobtainable classics they are today. Both Porsches came black-on-black, the
way the factory intended these devilishly fast faux-racers to be, but
today the sinister color scheme elevates them to a level of fierceness
of purpose that other Porsche colors can’t reach.
CarGuyMagazine.com
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