Very Ralph review – a flashy designer documentary
that's so last season
HBO’s look at Ralph Lauren’s multi-billion-dollar
fashion empire delves into an American Dream come true. But post–Trump, it
feels more grotesque than glitzy
Priya Elan
Fri 15 Nov
2019 10.36 GMT
The
rags-to-riches story of Ralph Lauren is something to behold. Born Ralph
Lifshitz on 14 October 1939 in the Bronx to Ashkenazi Jewish parents from
Belarus, he shared a bedroom with his two brothers and had no formal fashion
training. Instead of going to a prestigious fashion school, he started his
career flogging ties from a drawer in a showroom in the Empire State Building.
Now, that is but a distant memory; Lauren’s brand is worth $6.3bn and recently
celebrated its 50th anniversary. With a style that is a fever dream of WASP-ish
Americana – timeless and conservative – the Ralph Lauren story feels like
perfect fodder for a documentary like HBO’s Very Ralph, which aired in the US
earlier this week and in the UK on Friday.
Director
Susan Lacy tells the fairytale breathlessly, while also showing that Lauren was
at the forefront of many of today’s fashion concerns, from athleisure to
increasing diversity in his ad campaigns (he made waves when he featured Tyson
Beckford, an African American model, as the face of his suits). And yet,
despite all this potential, the film falls flat. Instead of narrative tension
we are fed endless scenes of his charmed life: here’s Ralph throwing the first
pitch at a Yankees baseball game, or emotionally embracing Oprah, or dressing
up like the Marlboro Man in a dusty cowboy hat and tight blue jeans to stand
round the fire at his Montauk ranch. Lacy only hints at the hollowness behind
Lauren’s Jay Gatsby-esque persona. “It’s performance art in which you
participate. It’s a stage set in which the clothes are on sale,” says fashion
writer Judith Thurman, talking about Ralph Lauren shops, though she could be
dissecting the man himself.
That the
documentary chooses to omit Lauren’s cancer scare – he had a benign brain
tumour removed in the 80s – also speaks volumes. Very Ralph has taken amazing
access to Lauren’s inner circle and pumped out nothing more than a series of
approved images of the man, all–American snapshots that would not be out of
place in a Ralph Lauren moodboard. It is the documentary equivalent of walking
through the after-spray of a luxury perfume, a souped up version of Through the
Keyhole. Which is a shame, partly because we are living in a golden age of
fashion documentaries (starting with The September Issue through to The Gospel
According to Andre, McQueen and Halston) that show you can mix the fabulous
fantasy of the catwalk with the darker realities of the fashion industry.
But its
issues run deeper than that. In the film, the late Karl Lagerfeld describes
Lauren as: “the American designer who best represents America and American
style for the rest of the world.” But what version of American style? And what
America? Post–Trump, the truth is that a very white, very male take on the
American Dream is hard to stomach. This is touched upon all too briefly at the
end of the film. “[Lauren’s] adherence to these narratives of America that are
core to his brand can get a little stale,” says New York Times fashion critic
Vanessa Friedman. “Particularly at a time when a lot of people who have not
felt included in these narratives are finding a voice and are demanding that we
rewrite how we think about all these stories.” And there lies the problem: in
its faithful reading of Ralph Lauren, the film renders the classic American
Dream, in its purest form, as something that is still attainable, something to
strive for, when for many it is forever soured.
Very Ralph
airs on Friday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic in the UK, and on HBO Go and HBO Now in the
US
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