208 OCTOBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
LAUREN ORDER
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marketing campaigns that didn’t just sell
products—they told stories.
Though it sounds so canny now, at the
time these were radical moves.
“Genius—it was genius!” Lauren says,
chuckling. (He recoils at fashion’s habit
of overwrought superlatives.) “I knew
what I was doing because I loved what I
did,” he says. “I wasn’t catering to some
lady somewhere, or some guy. I was cater-
ing to myself.”
Through it all, he has remained current
by sticking to his gut, refusing to fall into
the trap of chasing fads. “I love timeless-
ness,” Lauren explains. “I’ve always liked
things that get better with age.” Ve r y
Ralph drills down to the roots of Lauren’s
inspirations: classic movies, vintage cars,
style vanguards like Frank Sinatra.
“There’s a romance to Ralph,” says
Vera Wang, who worked as a design
director for Lauren in the late 1980s
before launching her own brand. “When
you look at the breadth of what he’s done,
there has to be this sense of romance
about life.”
At its core, though, Very Ralph isn’t a
fashion movie. It’s about family. Ralph
and Ricky married young, and they
remain close to their children, Andrew,
David, and Dylan. All of them appear in
the documentary, and there is a warmth
to their shared reminiscences—and some
never-seen-before family videos—as they
reveal a playful father who doted on his
wife and kids.
“We asked for all the home movies,”
Lacy says. She describes one of her
favorite scenes: “He’s dancing with
Andrew, carrying on, pretending to be
James Bond, pretending to be Sinatra. It
was such a beautiful side to him that, if
you were not in his family, you would
never know.”
“They’re just nice to be around,”
designer Thom Browne says of the Lau-
rens. “They’re a very normal family—
which is an amazing thing to say for a
family that really could have not been
so normal.”
Lauren is proud of how his family has
stayed close—there’s now a beach house
next door, previously Edward Albee’s, for
the extended clan—but he emphasizes
that the Laurens have ups and downs like
everyone else. The same goes for the
business: The company managed to
stave off financial pressures in its early
days, and going public in 1997 brought a
whole new level of scrutiny.
“There are good days and bad days,”
Lauren says. “Stock goes up, and all of
a sudden you’re a genius. Stock goes
down—‘What’s happening to Ralph
Lauren? Is he getting old?’ Those are
the questions you live with, and I live
with them.”
That sort of anxiety doesn’t compare
to an episode that is not covered in the
documentary: the moment in 1987 when,
after hearing a persistent ringing in his
ears, Lauren was diagnosed with a brain
tumor. At the time, he had three young
children at home and was deep in prepa-
rations for a show. “Here I was, doing all
the things I love, and someone tells me,
‘You’ve got a brain tumor,’ ” he says. He
thought, Am I watching a movie now? “I
couldn’t believe it.”
The tumor proved to be benign and
was treated successfully with surgery.
Still, “it was the worst time of my life,”
Lauren says. He struggled emotionally in
the aftermath and recalls thinking,You’re
alone. You’re not a star. You’re alone.
Lauren would bounce back and lead
his company fearlessly toward the 21st
century and beyond, and the documenta-
ry chronicles the expansion of his vision
to new faces like the African American
model Tyson Beckford, who, like Ralph,
was from the Bronx, and whose inclusion
defied white, patrician clichés around
preppy Wall Street style. “Here I am in a
Ralph Lauren ad, which was unheard-of
in the black community,” Beckford says.
“It changed my life.”
Today Lauren sees another mission for
fashion: environmental sustainability.
You can now buy an “Earth Polo” made
from recycled plastic bottles. The com-
pany has prioritized reaching younger
customers, and Lauren admires the way
in which new generations are seeking
brands that stand for both quality and
responsibility. “That’s where the world is
right now,” he says. “Young people want
it. Older people want it.”
After our talk, Lauren will be heading
back to the city and to work. The com-
pany’s seismic 50th-anniversary celebra-
tion has come and gone—it serves as the
documentary’s emotional crescendo—
but Lauren remains engaged and driven.
“Ralph still goes to the office every day,”
says Lacy. “It’s not for the cameras. He’s
really doing it.”
“It’s because I have something to say,”
Lauren tells me. “When I feel I have noth-
ing to say, and I can’t do it well, then I
have to go. That’s what challenges me.”
He has been fortunate. He says this
often, like a mantra. “I’ve been able to
realize my dreams, and that’s a wonderful
thing,” Lauren says. His hero Batman
may have fought crime and saved
Gotham City, but he lived a lonely exis-
tence. As Very Ralph makes clear, Ralph
Lauren embarked on a different kind of
adventure—one that also left a cultural
mark—and he did it surrounded by love.
I’d say Ralph won. @
CROWN JEWEL
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Colman grew up as a seaside girl, in
Norfolk, a windy, tide pool–trimmed idyll
on the North Sea. Her mother was a
nurse, her father a surveyor who returned
to university as an adult student. “We
moved houses quite a lot, just for fun,”
she says. “I had a nice, outdoorsy child-
hood—lots of camping, lots of walks on
very wet beaches with anoraks.” She had
no ambitions to become an actor (“It felt
like being a circus performer—if you
didn’t do it from childhood, how could
you?”) but watched what she could on the
family’s black-and-white TV: The Two
Ronnies, Knight Rider, Doctor Who. From
time to time her grandmother would take
her to the movies. “When Bambi’s mum-
my got done in, I think I had to be taken
out of the cinema, and I didn’t go back
for years,” she says. “Quite an emotional
child. Hard as nails now, obviously.”
On set, Colman is known for deep-
diving in and out of character as if flip-
ping a switch. “She just jumps; there’s no,
like, ramping in or ramping out,” Weisz
says. “Acting is about the speed at which
your mind and your imagination keep up,
and she’s got this incredibly fast mind.”
David Tennant describes Colman’s
plunge into the emotion of a character as
“infuriatingly, powerfully effortless”: “It
can be quite hard to pinpoint where Oliv-
ia ends and where her characters begin—
she has incredible access.” “Every actor
I’ve worked with has some version of
getting into character,” Stone says. “She
doesn’t even seemingly for a second—like,
ever. She’ll go from being ridiculous,
making a joke, whatever, to snapping into
a woman who’s just had a stroke, is dev-
astated, and is gout-afflicted.”
Colman calls herself “emotional, but
also emotionally stable”: tossed around
by the turbulence of each moment, but
placidly on course for the long journey.
She suggests that this style of being makes
acting less psychically corrosive than it
might otherwise be. “Some people, if
they’re playing a very emotional part, it
can take hold of them a bit, and I don’t
have that,” she says. “I feel it very much in
the moment. But as soon as they say,
‘Cut’: Ahh. It’s cathartic. I actually feel
much lighter, having had a good cry.”
In high school, Colman struggled to
