Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Very Ralph’ on HBO, a Glowing Portrait of Very Rich, Very Admired Guy Ralph Lauren

Very Ralph is HBO’s documentary profile of Ralph Lauren, the billionaire fashion designer who made everyone wish they had a horse and mallet and riding crop, but persuaded us to be content with a shirt instead. Director Susan Lacy’s challenge was to find a way into the private life of a notoriously private individual, and part of the film’s allure is footage of Lauren outside his glossy fashion-world bubble. But does she succeed in finding the man beneath the icon?

VERY RALPH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz in The Bronx, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Belarus. He grew up in a modest home, crammed into a bedroom with his two older brothers. He’s now worth nearly $7 billion, and Ralph Lauren is an internationally recognized clothing brand. His story, the film insists, is absolutely emblematic of the American dream.

How did he make the leap from an abnormally handsome New Yorker in a teensy apartment to one of the world’s most influential and beloved fashion designers? By following his gut. He never studied design, but had a distinctive “eye” for fashion, inspired by cowboys, sports and Hollywood superstars such as Cary Grant, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra; he wanted the clothes the actors wore, but couldn’t find them in stores. In the late 1960s, he worked selling ties, then began designing his own, peddling them to department stores. When Bloomingdale’s wanted him to remove his brand from the products in order to put them on the sales floor, he boldly refused.

Don’t worry, Bloomingdales eventually came back around. They gave him an in-store boutique — unheard of at the time — and soon enough, people wanted shirts, pants and jackets to go with their ties. He created the Polo brand for men (1968), moved into women’s wear (1971), opened a store in London (1981), ventured into interior home designs (1983), restored a Manhattan mansion for a flagship store (1986) and transitioned to a publicly traded company (1997). Over the decades, his designs became mostly instantly recognizable (thanks to that little polo player logo and great big heaps of red, white and blue), worn and admired by everyone from upper-crusties to JCPenney shoppers to hip-hop kids. And now he’s got more money than Donald Trump, several times over.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lacy’s biodoc Spielberg was similarly fawning and uncritical, but ultimately more detailed. Very Ralph also brings to mind the popular Ruth Bader Ginsberg profile RBG, which was more successful at finding the sweet spot between flattery and insight.

Performance Worth Watching: Rapper Thirstin Howl III is the most vibrant among the film’s many talking heads, showing off the Polo waistband of his underwear and explaining how he and others shoplifted expensive clothing from stores to boost their head-to-toe Ralph Lauren wardrobes.

Memorable Dialogue: Ken Burns gets very Ken Burnsy when commenting on the Lauren brand: “You’re not just buying an article of clothing. You’ve joined a narrative.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: No argument: Ralph Lauren is an icon. He’s also a person, and Lacy drafts an illustration of the person — as much as she’s allowed, anyway. The film is somewhat insightful in this aspect, giving us snatches of what the man behind the brand is like: his elegantly coiffed children and siblings and Ralph Lauren Corp. executives and brutally rich friends paint him as a devoted family man who works hard, even now, at 80 years old. A snatch of grainy archival footage shows Lauren at home, dressed in a white dinner jacket and bow tie singing Sinatra, a rare animated moment for such a reserved, soft-spoken individual. The film is colored by recent shots of him working alone in one of his palatial homes at a glass table adjacent to a vase full of pheasant feathers, and it looks like an glossy magazine ad. You can all but smell the perfume sample inserts. His admirers will love it.

And boy, does Very Ralph trot out his admirers. Calvin Klein, Ken Burns, Kanye West, Naomi Campbell, Woody Allen, Hillary Clinton, Joel Schumacher, Donna Karan, a bevy of current and former fashion editors and critics, all of whom speak in almost uniformly glowing tones about Lauren’s character and work, deploying threadbare cliches at every opportunity: He’s timeless but living in the now. He did a lot of things before they were things. The clothes are an extension of the person. They’re not just clothes, they’re a lifestyle. Stuff like that.

The documentary caps with a 50th-anniversary celebration of his corporate brand, in Central Park, attended by people known by single ubiquitous names — Spielberg, De Niro, Oprah. As the film progresses, a significant problem manifests: how to accurately capture Lauren’s intuitive nature. This is where Lacy flounders mightily; the word “lifestyle” is thrown around by talking heads like candy at the Independence Day parade until it lacks any meaning or impact. Some say Lauren was “anti-fashion,” but what does that mean, really? Further elucidation of this glaring contradiction never happens, frustratingly, and anyone who doesn’t understand the business of fashion will walk away with very little insight.

Note that any dates in the summary above I’ve culled from Wikipedia, not the film, which doesn’t bother with such details. If you’re wondering why Woody Allen is in Very Ralph, it’s because Lauren designed the iconic wardrobe for Annie Hall, not that the doc bothers to mention it. Maybe it assumes we already know that. I’ve seen Annie Hall a dozen times, but such trivia eluded me. Maybe I’m the dummy? Or maybe that’s Lacy’s goal, to be impressionistic, to paint a broad picture of a man in his own idealistic American colors and terms, and not try to cover 80 years of life and business in 100 minutes. The director glances over the company’s turnover in CEOs, barely touches on how rappers embraced the Polo brand and doesn’t even mention Lauren’s personal travails, e.g., a benign brain tumor he had removed in 1987. The film feels incomplete, and so heavily sweetened, you’ll want to brush your teeth twice after watching it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Very Ralph is very much a hagiography, more advertisement than profile. (Weirdly, it never mentions Lauren’s philanthropy; these type of movies always mention that, as if it’s part of the deal of getting the film made in the first place.) It offers a sketch of a man who not only turned his personal aesthetic into art that became wildly successful and profitable, but also a man with a collection of sports cars that even James Bond would covet; a man with homes in Montauk, Manhattan, rural Colorado and Bedford (“And then there’s Jamaica,” his son adds); a man sitting exactly between Bill and Hillary Clinton at a gala; a man getting kissed by Oprah. What he actually thinks of all this, or anything else, is beyond me.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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