Ralph Lauren couldn't have chosen a more fitting backdrop to stage his Spring 2027 collection. With its soaring white marble columns, nearly 30-foot gilded coffered ceilings, and enormous arched windows, 108 Leonard was built at the end of the 19th century as the headquarters of the New York Life Insurance Company. The Italian Renaissance Revival landmark—better known as the Clock Tower Building—was designed to project permanence. More than a century later, its landmarked bones remain, but the building has been painstakingly restored and reimagined for modern New York.
The metaphor is hard to miss; the Ralph Lauren brand turns 60 next year.
Few designers have built a universe as recognizable, or as enduring, as Lauren has since he started selling ties in 1967. We know and love the Ralph Lauren woman. She rides horses. She borrows from the boys. She wears faded denim with a formal overcoat and can make a crisp white shirt feel like her entire personality. At night, she changes into a gown. The remarkable thing, nearly six decades later, is how Lauren keeps finding new sides to her without turning her into somebody else. And for Spring 2027, she's ready to let her hair down.
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Getty“Spring 2027 is an irreverent take on romance that creates a new elegance,” Lauren wrote in his show notes. “It’s about ways of dressing that celebrate ingenuity, originality, and character—the freedom and fun of creating a style that is truly personal.” Elegance at a Ralph Lauren show is a given. But Spring 2027 proved that elegance doesn’t have to always come with so much restraint.
The freedom was felt from the first look. An all-white ensemble initially read as quintessential Ralph: wide-legged trousers and clean lines, until you got to the top—a corseted silk brocade number with a plunging V-shaped waist and sleeves hitting just below the elbow. It was romantic, but the corset made it feel a little subversive.
The second look featured low-slung navy trousers and a classic white vest were topped with a breezy white jacket framed by shaggy shearling. Throughout the collection, that same slightly bohemian, slightly Penny Lane-esque streak kept appearing: distressed jeans with abbreviated shearling jackets, shrunken brocade and velvet, flashes of fringe and feathers (on the shoes, no less!). Bohemianism is hardly foreign territory for Lauren—just last fall, this same room was filled with ruffled jabots, velvet tailoring and riding jackets—but here, the romance felt less aristocratic and a little more rock-and-roll.
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GettyEven the styling seemed to suggest this Ralph woman had dressed herself with a new instinct. Long fringed and silk scarves alike were knotted around the hips instead of the neck. Oversized floral brooches appeared on jacket lapels. Tiny, meticulously constructed jackets met enormous trousers. A wide blue necktie—a wink to where Lauren's career began—was worn with a matching brocade shirt and washed denim.
My favorite look was a gold, sequin-trimmed fringed scarf top wrapped around the body, dipping low at the waist and slinked over the shoulders, with a pair of languid navy trousers underneath. It was sensual without trying hard to be, something Lauren has always had a knack for (who can forget his Spring 2024 collection, which transformed silk foulards into halter tops and sarongs?). It was easy to picture the Ralph girl who had just finished her ride for the day, wrapping something shimmery around herself and deciding to go dancing in it.
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GettyThat sense of ease belies an extraordinary amount of work. Lauren's notes detail hand-painted and burnout techniques used on silks, lamés and velvets; ombré shearling; embroidered skirts; and oversized sequins coated to purposely dull their shine. Full-skirted dresses were deliberately rumpled using a process called “spritz and tumble.” Even fabrics associated with pristine eveningwear were made to feel as though they'd already lived a life.
And then came the gowns. No one designs a gown quite like Ralph Lauren. The evening looks seemed to shimmer, rather than just sparkle. A fluid wrap dress was engineered with a single seam; a golden floor-length skirt drifted down the runway like liquid silk, or molten lava. The most attention-getting look of the collection had to be the voluminous cobalt-blue skirt paired with a matching shirt, unbuttoned almost to the navel. As the model walked, the skirt caught the air and billowed around her like a cloud, taking up an almost audacious amount of space
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GettyLauren has been playing with the same broad vocabulary for decades—Western references and aristocratic tailoring, masculine and feminine, eveningwear and workwear, the ranch and Fifth Avenue. His show notes call it a dialogue between the “rugged and refined.”
At 108 Leonard, the bones of the original building remain unmistakable even after its transformation. The marble is still marble; the clock tower still rises over Broadway. What has changed is the way the building is inhabited. Nearly 60 years in, Lauren seems to understand something similar about his own house. Longevity doesn't have to mean preservation for preservation's sake.
The Spring 2027 Ralph Lauren woman is still the same woman: elegant, timeless, and confident in knowing exactly who she is. This season, she’s just finding the fun in letting a little loose.