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If there is a single American fashion designer who can be credited with articulating something resembling a national identity through his work, it is Ralph Lauren. This isn’t a hot take: Lauren’s lauded oeuvre has spanned decades and been subject to scholarship, scrutiny, and accolades of all sorts. Today, at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., he will receive the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a citizen by the government of the United States: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lauren is the first fashion designer to be granted the medal. He’ll join a list of names that includes Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Maya Angelou, and even the man who will award him with the honor, President Joseph R. Biden.
There’s no set criteria for receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It comes down entirely to the sensibility and sometimes the politics of the President giving out the award. During President Trump’s first term he awarded posthumous medals to Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley alongside one for deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Biden himself received his from the President he served under, Barack Obama, during the duo’s final year in office. In that sense, a list of the recipients of the medal paints as thorough and honest a portrait of American identity (for better and worse) as any sort of national canon.
As silly as it might seem to some to think about fashion at a time like this, Lauren’s name is one that belongs on the list of recipients. What we–and I don’t only mean “menswear heads” or “fashion dorks” when I say “we”—put on before we walk out the door in the morning says as much about who we are as Americans as what we read, what we listen to, and how we treat our neighbors. His work is as American as Ruth and Presley, as influential on his chosen medium as Angelou’s is to hers. Take a look at modern streetwear, prep, western, and workwear. All bear his fingerprints, all owe him a debt for charting the course. Neither new-era J.Crew, Aimé Leon Dore, nor Fear of God would exist without the path Lauren charted, and each brand’s respective creative head would be the first to tell you that. His reach is so vast as to be invisible. If someone has worn a white oxford with blue jeans, thrown on a snap-button denim shirt under a blazer, or rocked an oversized lowercase-P polo that doesn’t even bear his logo with a crisp pair of Air Force Ones, Lauren has played some small part in that decision.
Over six decades, Ralph Lauren has set a bar that may be impossible for any American designer to ever reach again. But the endeavor of striving to even graze it for a second is one in which anybody concerned with crafting clothes should be engaged. And years from now, when another American designer is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, they will once again be the first to tell you: Ralph did it first.
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