Ralph Lauren Fashion News

Ralph Lauren is joining forces with Swiss luxury goods firm Compagnie Financière Richemont to create a jewellery and watch company. The joint venture – Polo Ralph Lauren Watch and Jewellery Co. S.A.R.L. - will be based in Switzerland , where it will design, make and distribute luxury watches and jewellery. Starting prices for watches will be $3,000.

“I believe strongly in this partnership,” Polo chairman Ralph Lauren said of the venture in a statement. “This business is an important part of our global luxury accessories strategy. I am confident that our unique design sensibility and luxury brand-building skills, combined with Richemont's unique experience on a global basis, creates an opportune way for this partnership to succeed.” Lauren and Richemont's executive chairman Johann Rupert have been working on the creation of this company for two and a half years. The venture is new to both; Polo has never crossed over into the jewellery and watch market before and Richemont has never collaborated with a designer, instead owning design companies in their entirety.

The pair chose a joint venture, instead of a license or partnership, because of its authenticity. “I don't have licenses,” Rupert told WWD. “The question with licenses is always who is controlling the design and who has the final say.”

The watches will debut in the spring of next year in Geneva and the first products will hit stores in fall 2008. Neither company wanted to give sales projections. Meanwhile, jewellery sales are likely to begin on a smaller scale than watches. Rupert said that the category would, however, grow faster than watches, taking into account that “generally as a sector, it is growing quicker than watches.”

According to Rupert, this joint venture is a one-off and does not mean that Richemont has changed its strategy. It will continue to own luxury brand portfolios, such as Cartier, Piaget, IWC, Jaeger-le-Coultre and Baume & Mercier. In terms of the strategy for the new company, it will be positioned as a global brand with considerable growth potential in the US.

Source: http://www.fashionunited.co.uk/news/polo.htm

Sources have confirmed that Polo has renewed its lease for more than 150,000 square feet at the nearly 500,000-square-foot building exquisitely located in the middle of the Plaza District -- just one block away from Central Park and the GM Building.

Last we heard, Polo was the largest office tenant in the 27-story, emerald tower, which Hiro North American Properties last year sold to Ashkenazy Acquisitions and the Carlyle Group for $680 million.

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Until a couple of years ago, the stretch between 71st and 72nd Streets on Madison Avenue, not far from where I live, was a pleasant retail hodgepodge of small boutiques. There was Alain Mikli, the eyeglasses purveyor, but its lease expired. The stationery store vanished, but the clerks were snooty, and I was glad to see them go. Silvano Lattanzi, bespoke shoemaker, moved up the avenue.

On the corner of 72nd Street was the Rhinelander mansion, built for a socialite who dreamed of living in a Loire Valley chateau. Since 1986, it has housed the 20,000-square-foot Ralph Lauren flagship. In 1993 a Bauhaus-inspired Ralph Lauren store selling sportier wear opened across the street.

But something slightly eerie has taken place: in the last couple of years those two Ralph Lauren emporiums reached out their tentacles and consumed every single one of the little storefronts on the west side of Madison between 71st and 72nd Streets. Hidden from view for weeks or months, the new shops emerged one by one from their white seedpods — excuse me, wallboard and scaffolding — as fresh outposts prepared to indoctrinate future generations of Ralph Lauren shoppers.

The only non-Polo entity left on the entire block is St. James’ Episcopal Church, an institution of historic social standing on the Upper East Side, which apparently could not be pried from its roost at the southeast corner. I, a Catholic, don’t attend, but I do have a good friend who comes from the kind of family that inspires the Lauren-esque blend of luxury, money and Pietàs.

“You know, I was married there once,” he tells me every time we walk past the church. “I just can’t remember to which wife.”

In that remark lies the genius of Ralph Lauren. Mr. Lauren has created a storybook fantasy out of the attractive parts of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, leaving out all the ugly bits. When I think of that disappearing cryptoclass, I can’t help but think of John Cheever and the dislocation and anomie of “The Sorrows of Gin” or “The Swimmer.” But on Planet Polo, families dress up for horseback riding, golf and tennis, and pack their perfectly weather-beaten satchels for Nantucket and Bermuda. There are no divorces or drunks there, nor do families squabble over the last shreds of a dwindled fortune that once, long ago, vaulted their ancestors briefly into the upper classes.

For a while I tried to convince myself not to be alarmed at how the neighborhood had been transformed into a Disney-like mall of Ralph Lauren stores. But in the spring I read the Joan Didion memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” and came across a passage in which Ms. Didion, who also lives nearby, describes how many times during the day she thinks of things to tell her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who had recently died. “I notice some change in the neighborhood that would interest him,” she writes. “Ralph Lauren has expanded into more space between 71st and 72nd Streets.”

I stopped. Rubbed my eyes. Reread. There it was: Page 194. This titan of literature, one half of perhaps America’s greatest literary duo of the last quarter-century, had seen fit, in the Pulitzer Prize-nominated ode to her late husband, to muse on Ralph Lauren’s expansion on Madison Avenue.

WALKING along the block, as I do almost every day, puts me in mind of walking along a stage set, from the perfectly shined brass knobs on the doors, to the outfit worn every day by Freddy, the man who hoses down the sidewalk in front of the Rhinelander mansion every morning: perfectly pressed khakis, Wellington boots and a Polo button-down. He is the best-dressed sidewalk-washer in Manhattan.

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Ralph Lauren has a contract to run the design empire he founded, Polo Ralph Lauren, that does not expire for another year. But Mr. Lauren, the indefatigable fashion icon, has already re-upped through March 2013, when he will be 73. His five-year extension could be worth much more than $100 million, and that’s not counting the reimbursement for the mandatory use of private jets and helicopters for all of his business and personal travel.

Mr. Lauren, the chairman and chief executive, will receive a salary of $1.25 million as well as annual bonuses of as much as $19.5 million. And each year he will also get 100,000 options and 75,000 shares of restricted stock, currently worth more than $7 million. PATRICK McGEEHAN

DIALING MR. BROWN Ever since Carl C. Icahn started rattling the cages at Motorola in January, people have been wondering how long Edward J. Zander, the ch
ief executive, would last. Last week the pressure heated up as the company reported its second consecutive quarterly loss after failing to come up with a hot-selling replacement for the Razr cellphone.

Thomas J. Meredith, Motorola’s chief financial officer, said the company’s board supports Mr. Zander and is not searching for a replacement. But industry analysts say Gregory Q. Brown, the company’s chief operating officer, could soon replace Mr. Zander. They add that few people have all the skills needed to run a cellphone maker. KEN BELSON

HEIR SHOW It will be family night on Wednesday for the scions of two famous American clans at the big annual air show in Oshkosh, Wis.

Edsel B. Ford II, a Ford director and great-grandson of the company’s founder, Henry Ford, will team up with Eric Lindbergh, the grandson of Charles Lindbergh. They will introduce a showing of “The Spirit of Saint Louis,” the classic film starring Jimmy Stewart, at the EAA AirVenture, billed as the country’s biggest show for private aviation.

Mr. Lindbergh, the pilot, and Mr. Ford, the auto company founder, were friends, while Edsel Ford is known as an aviation buff. His presence is just part of the auto company’s expanded role at the show, which attracts 650,000 people a year. Ford, which has been the main corporate sponsor for AirVenture since 1999, will use it this year as a mini-car show. It will display vehicles like the Flex, a crossover scheduled to be introduced in 2008, and offer test drives and seminars.

Of course, Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, is the company’s biggest current link to aviation: he joined Ford last year from Boeing. But Mr. Mulally will not be attending the show. MICHELINE MAYNARD

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One of the Black Watch players, an Argentine named Ignacio Figueras, had already been a Ralph Lauren model before the sponsorship started and is featured wearing some of the Black Watch line on Ralph Lauren Official Website

Less glamorous has been the ongoing litigation between Ralph Lauren and others that have tried to capitalize on the sport. In the latest case, the designer alleged that four logos with polo players the polo association had licensed to clothing maker Jordache infringed on Polo trademarks, but a jury approved all but one of the association’s logos. Ralph Lauren appealed, and the case is scheduled to go before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in October. Mr. Ferguson said that the volume of litigation has tapered off.

The company, meanwhile, is saddling up for higher-profile events. For the third consecutive year, it is sponsoring the United States Open in Flushing Meadows, Queens, which began last week; for the last two years, the company also has sponsored Wimbledon.

At last year’s United States Open, the company’s 2,500-foot retail store on the stadium grounds had more transactions than any of its other nearly 300 retail stores, though a spokesman declined to give actual sales figures.