On Friday night, Ralph Lauren staged its first dedicated men’s show, and first show in Milan, in more than two decades. The show – which took place in the Palazzo Ralph Lauren, the brand’s Milan home since 1999 – also marked the first time the brand has presented its Polo and Purple Label lines together. It mashed up Ralph’s many influences, from Purple Label sharp tailoring, overcoats and and tuxedos, to a technicolor Polo collection, featuring retro-inspired skiwear and outerwear, Alpine knits, Western suede jackets and cowboy hats, contrasted with romantic pussy bow collars, tailored overcoats and naturally, NY Yankees caps.
Despite the luxury slowdown that’s seen the majority of major houses face losses or incremental growth in recent years, Ralph Lauren has been a bright spot. Brand revenues increased 14% year-on-year on a constant currency basis to $2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, ended September 27 2025, above its high-single-digit outlook. And for fiscal 2025, the brand reported 8% revenue growth to $7.1 billion. Gross margin also hit 68.8%, up from 66.6% the year prior, which analysts attribute to the brand’s multi-year elevation strategy, conceived by CEO and president Patrice Louvet following his appointment in 2017. For much of that period, growth has been focused on the women’s category.
At this exciting moment for the brand, sandwiched between its men’s and women’s fashion shows (for which the brand will return to New York) and the Winter Olympics (it’s again designed the Team USA uniforms), I sat down with Louvet, to unpack his strategy for scaling menswear and the wider business through 2026 and beyond.
Hi Patrice. This is the first dedicated Ralph Lauren men’s show in a long time, and the first time you’re combining Polo and Purple Label. What led to this event?
I’m really excited, because we’ve historically only given the audience a sliver of what we offer in men’s. And I think today, people will get to see the full [picture]. We have 80 year olds and 16 year olds wearing our brand. And to me, it actually feels like there’s been a missed opportunity, frankly, to only showcase Purple Label, because that’s not how we think as a company. That’s not how Ralph and [Senior Brand Creative Director, Men’s Polo, RLX, Purple Label and Children’s Polo] John Wrazej and our designers approach it. We really think about the guys that we want to appeal to, what their life is like, and how we fit within their lifestyle.
I think you should expect that this is not a one off. We will put continued emphasis on the overall menswear portfolio as we continue to drive our womenswear business, because the opportunity is quite strong there as well.
I know scaling the Ralph Lauren womenswear business has been a focus for you in recent years. But where do you see growth potential in the men’s business?
This company started as a menswear company. It all started with a tie. We have put a lot of emphasis on our women’s business because it has both great momentum and great opportunity. We wanted to be able to showcase that. But the core of this company, historically, is menswear. We have a unique portfolio between the prestigious Purple Label, the day to day active Polo label and Western and workwear inspired line RRL. There are no other companies that have a portfolio this rich and this complete. We want to make sure we continue to drive visibility of that.
There’s been a real preppy mood in menswear in recent seasons. Since the streetwear boom slowed down a little bit, it seems more and more men are dressing in the spirit of Ralph Lauren. Have you seen an effect on the business and on the consumer base?
So, I’m going to challenge the premise of your question, if I may. We do get pigeonholed as preppy. And of course, preppy is one of the sensibilities that we have across the portfolio. But I think it’s unfair to summarize us as preppy, because there’s so many different dimensions that we have available. You know, a lot of what we offer on Purple Label is sartorial craftsmanship that doesn’t have a lot to do with prep, right?
As a business, we want to be timeless in what we offer. We actually don’t like trends. We don’t want to create trends. We’re not interested in writing trends. You know, people wanted to talk about Ralph Lauren Christmas. That’s great, but we’re not creating that. We’re not fueling that. We have offerings that are meant to be evergreen, that are meant to go well beyond what the trend of the moment is. It’s interesting because I’ve been in this job now for almost nine years, and the number of times people have said, well, ‘prep is in, prep is out’. I actually believe that all these trends are always on to varying degrees. I don’t believe trends disappear. But we work really hard not to be dependent on them.
You’ve mentioned Ralph Lauren consumers can be aged 16-80. How do you bring young consumers to the brand without alienating the 80-year-old who has worn Ralph Lauren for decades?
The risk is you just focus on one generation, and you end up ignoring or going as far as alienating another. We’ve increased our marketing investments quite meaningfully. We were [spending] about 3.5% of revenue seven or eight years ago. We’re now closer to 8%. This has afforded us the ability to have a broad range of marketing activations, which we target and slice many different ways, for many different generations.
For the 80-year-old man, it’s the ad we have in The New York Times on the weekends. Or it may be how we show up at Wimbledon. For Gen Z and younger, it’s the work we do with influencers. We have activations on Roblox. We sponsor the YouTube G2 and T1 teams, which are the leading teams in League of Legends. Depending on the consumer that we want to appeal to, we understand where they want to engage.
Of course it’s been a challenging moment for luxury broadly. How have you weathered the challenges the luxury industry has faced in recent years?
For us it’s actually been an opportunity. If you look at how we’ve performed during this luxury challenge period, the company’s gotten stronger. It’s been an opportunity for many reasons. First, we’ve gained clarity on who we are. You look at the industry and many fashion houses have lost clarity on who they are exactly, and therefore the consumers have lost that clarity and consistency. Ralph and I talk about this all the time. And then the next point is making sure the consumer sees value. Yes, we’ve had cost headwinds. Cotton has gone up. We also have tariffs to deal with, but we’re very thoughtful and deliberate in terms of how we address these cost headwinds, such that the consumer still feels like they’re getting distinctive and unique value.
It could be that some companies have come across as being too commercial to consumers, and that turns consumers off. Churchill said, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’. And the broader luxury challenges have actually turned out to be an opportunity for us.
Your team shared that according to your internal Global Brand Health Tracker for FY25, amongst male and premium consumers worldwide, Ralph Lauren was ranked number one for value perception. How do you drive, as you put it, this distinctive and unique value?
I’m glad you picked up on that, because that’s really important to us, and I think it’s one of the differentiators and drivers of the long term success of this company. Part one is, we invested in the product, and consumers see that. Part two is the storytelling, the styling. We want consumers to feel they can wear a product in 10 or 20 years. And then, we work carefully on how we price. We want to make sure that within the competitive set, we understand the target consumer, so they go, ‘OK, this is worth it.’ We stay very vigilant on that.
So while I’m very excited to see how our luxury perception continues to increase quarter on quarter, I’m also really pleased to see that our value perception stays strong and continues to strengthen. It’s a little counter intuitive, because we’ve doubled our AUR (average price of items at retail) over the past eight years. But our value perception has never been this strong, which means the work we’re doing on quality, the work we’re doing on communication, and the attention we’re paying to the price positioning is really resonating.
I did some research on Gen Z last year, and they largely told me that they don’t think the major luxury houses are worth the price since the price rises after the pandemic. How do you make sure you’re being seen differently?
Here’s how we think about value. Often people will say, ‘Let’s take the price up.’ The value equation is really the combination of the product quality, the storytelling and the shopping experience, divided by price. And so we work very hard on the numerator of this formula.
Therefore we can support this type of pricing. I think a number of players in the industry, because of the cost headwinds, just moved the denominator. But they didn’t change the numerator, and therefore the math equation is off.
You mentioned the shopping experience. Are there any innovations you’re investing in?
In September, we launched Ask Ralph, our AI-powered styling guide, in the US where, through an LLM (language learning model), Ralph Lauren can help you with your outfit for a specific event or a specific situation. For example, “I am going to my friend’s baby shower. This is what it’s going to feel like. The weather sucks. It’s going to be freezing. What do you suggest?” Right? As we think about agentic AI, you can actually see what the future of this platform will be. So it starts as a styling tool, but I can see it evolving to serve other quotes like “where’s my package?”, “is the store open now?” or “will my sales associate be available? I plan to go next week,” so we’re leaning into that. I think that’s going to change retail quite meaningfully.
We recently reported on the changing menswear influencer landscape and one key finding was that menswear consumers are seeking styling advice online, from creators or forums like Reddit. It feels like Ask Ralph could also fill that gap.
It’s funny you say that because I was at the NRF [conference] at the beginning of the week. We built Ask Ralph with Microsoft. Shelley Bransten, [Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Industry Solutions, Microsoft] said, ’for the first time, my husband bought me an outfit using Ask Ralph that I did not have to return’. And Matthew Shay, the CEO of NRF had put his outfit together through Ask Ralph. So it’s helpful! We’re going to continue to understand how the landscape changes and evolve our retail engagements in Asia, too. In China, particularly, you have the Douyin platform, which we started in earnest for women’s Polo. Now we’re going to activate it on men’s Polo. We just started activating on TikTok Shop, too. So these are also new spaces where we can engage with the consumer. We can be very data based, and really meet their needs as best as possible. There’s a lot of innovation going on on the retail front for us as a company.
Of course, it’s almost the Winter Olympics where Ralph Lauren will outfit Team USA. The brand has been so embedded in sport for such a long time, from tennis to golf. Are you considering new sports?
We get offers all the time. So the challenge is already being selective because if you look at Ralph’s philosophy and lifestyle, it’s relevant everywhere. Could we be in cricket? We have a cricket sweater, so yes, our style is relevant. Could we be in rugby? Well, we have a brand called Rugby, and it’s linked to collegiate life, as we are. We have nothing to announce today, but we are constantly asking ourselves, where do we [show up]? That’s why we’re in gaming now, we haven’t been in gaming before, and so that’s our lens, which is where there’s a consumer want to engage with brands like ours, and therefore how to make sure we’re there, and how to make sure we’re there in a way that’s authentic, how to make sure we’re there in a way that’s not just a one off, but that kind of builds credibility over time.
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Update: This story was updated to include John Wrazej, Matthew Shay and Shelley Bransten’s full titles.
