Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

American English

Real English aristocrats shop at Tesco and do not brush their hair for fear of dislodging small animals

issue 18 February 2017

Ralph’s Coffee & Bar is in the Polo Ralph Lauren flagship store on Regent Street. It is rare that fashion admits food exists and when it does, it usually does something insane with it, like when the Berkeley Hotel celebrated fashion week by inventing a shoe biscuit, so you could eat your shoe.

But Ralph Lauren, who dresses Melania Trump because other designers will not — believing that the withholding of couture equals meaningful opposition to tyranny, a position that makes me laugh even as I place my head in the oven — goes beyond couture and into the weird lands of lifestyle. Don’t know who you are, but want to pretend that you do? Find a lifestyle brand that approximates who you think you might be, and follow it into a Polo Ralph Lauren coffin.

Polo Ralph Lauren will clad the itinerant international shopper — we are in Regent Street, where brands are countries, with flags — in a purely American fantasy of how aristocratic English people live.

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