Ralph Lauren.
Photograph: Scott Tries/ Getty Images
A special story comes to us today from one of LiS' favourite designers, Ralph Lauren. Lauren - the one who looks, walks and designs a lot like Calvin Klein but has whiter hair, is straighter and less prone to wandering onto basketball courts in "a confused state of mind"- has ratcheted up a multimillion, possibly even billion dollar empire from milking his particular brand of Americana.
It's a brand now rather inconveniently similar to one worked by the current and increasingly unpopular President, based as it is on good ol' down south design: no pine-lined ski lodge is complete without a cow skull hanging in the corner, no pair of jeans finished without a cowhide belt, no collection done without a helluva lot of leather included. In other words, if you're a cow, you might want to avoid Ralph Lauren.
Anyway, here is a gripping story in the International Herald Tribune, emblazoned on the masthead and given a full page inside, saying that Lauren is opening a store in Moscow (see yesterday's item regarding the Independent for further proof that there are plenty other broadsheets that cover stories more inane than the Guardian would consider, existence of LiS notwithstanding.)
And, yes, here we are, Lauren suddenly waxng sentimental about his "Russian roots." Did you know Ralphie boy was a Russian Jew? No, of course you wouldn't, because he changed his surname to Lauren from the admittedly less aspirational "Lifshitz." Now, if there's one thing we New York Jews get cross about is this kind of malarkey: if you have the privilege of being born Jewish, with all the innate humour, sexiness and general fabulousness this entails, then you're going to have to pay a certain tax. For some of us, this means a propensity to dark under eye circles and a mother obsessed with marrying you off, quicksmart. For others, it's having a surname that sounds like an eighty year old clearing out some phlegm. Those are dem breaks.
And one thing you definitely can't do is wangle your way out of the Jewishness and then play on it when it suits you. Still, proving that there is an Old Testament god and he is vengeful, Ralph has got his comeuppance in that his son, the Dead Poets Society-lookalike David, has been squiring around a young lady by the name of Lauren Bush. Excellent news for Ralph in that he is now officially connected to one of America's leading dynasties and one that, as we already said, shares his aesthetic taste. Bad news, though, as it means, thanks to his skill at choosing names, his future daughter-in-law will be called Lauren Lauren. Worse than a plague of falling toads, ain't it?
Anyoldways, young David doesn't seem to have learned the lesson from this story. At the end of the fascinating Herald Tribune article David trills that, in order to help him reconnect with a country he describes as "somewhere between the humorous interpretation of Woody Allen in Love and Death and a very cultured people" he, in true zeitgeist style, played a certain song on his iPod as the plane landed. Yes, it was Back in the USSR. LiS would like to invoke the spirit of Shylock at this point.
