Dressing History: Nostalgia and Class
in the Worlds of Ralph Lauren
Over the last number of years, it has been recognized that advertising is not
simply a state of affairs whereby the consumer is manipulated “as a victim” into
purchasing a particular item. As a matter of fact the relationship between con
sumer and advertiser has become much more sophisticated, to the point in fact that
a “polysemous” process is at work. What is integral to comprehend for the pur
poses of this paper is the concept that advertisers make use of “established codes
of status, desire, fear, and need.” (Pavitt, “In Goods” 38) It is also important to
recognize that the consumer is intimately involved in defining or refining his or
her identity by purchasing a particular product or embracing a manufactured look.
The question “Is that me?” comes into play here in a very significant way. As
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has observed, the purchasing of products such as
clothing to define one’s identity occupies the same important role as choosing a
profession. (Cited in Pavitt, “Branding,” 156).
When looking at the advertisements for the products of designer Ralph Lauren,
— whether Polo, Polo Sport, or Purple Label — the words that come to mind are
nostalgia, taste, refinement, class and old money. What the people behind the ads
do (no doubt with Ralph Lauren’s full consent) is attempt to harness the patina of
age, with all that that entails, in order to create a series of “worlds” where time
stands still. These ads and the related marketing programs are quite similar to
Roland Marchand’s description of the popular “social tableaux”. Marchand com
ments that “reflections of society” advertisements were utilized in early magazine
illustrations to link people to specific social settings. They relied on “scenes suffi
ciently stereotypical to bring immediate audience recognition.” The social tableau
advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s, had, as Marchand notes, a tendency to
focus on an upper-class atmosphere with such prevalence that “a historian relying
exclusively on their manifest evidence could only conclude that most Americans
of that era enjoyed an exceedingly affluent and leisured mode of life” (Marchand
165, 166).
A key trope in this recipe is the perception that what is stylistically “classic”,
in sartorial and material terms, is automatically equated with the casual yet sophis
ticated taste of the upper classes. The Veblien notion of the “veneration of the
archaic”, which as Paul Fussel has demonstrated, “shows itself everywhere”, is a
concept that many people hold in high esteem, if not revere. (Fussel, 71-73)2 This