Inside The First-Ever PoloFest In Tokyo, A Vintage Marketplace – And Much More – For 10,000 Ralph Lauren Fans

It was back in March 2006, while visiting Tokyo for the opening of his flagship store in Omotesando, that Ralph Lauren and his son David were approached by a fan carrying a huge binder. “It was a book of his collection,” David recalled last Thursday night. The collector invited the Laurens to see it in person. “So we went out to this airplane hangar full of Ralph Lauren vintage. It was a giant hangar. We learned that he was trading with people in Japan and all around the world. And we realised that we had stumbled into a subculture that was pretty intense.”

That encounter 20 years ago sowed a seed that blossomed over the weekend into the first-ever PoloFest. Held in a sprawling exhibition space in Tokyo’s Harajuku district, the Ralph Lauren-organised event saw 17 Polo-specialising dealers from around the world combine to offer 5,000 specially selected vintage Polo pieces from their respective collections for sale. The fully subscribed event welcomed 10,000 visitors, the vast majority of them confirmed Polo stans dressed top-to-toe in Polo, over three days.

PoloFest also introduced a new twist to the exclusively vintage clothes. In order to meet local regulatory requirements, each freshly dry cleaned vintage garment offered on sale carried a newly stitched-in Japanese label identifying it as vintage alongside the name of Ralph Lauren’s Japanese business. This, buyers quickly realised, gave each already-collectible piece an extra marker of specialness.

As well as offering plenty of new-old Polo classics and rarities to add to their wardrobes, the festival featured a plethora of pursuits for the crowds of Polo-maniacs to relish. There was a sort of tunnel-of-Ralph, in which you were immersed in old recordings of Lauren discussing his cinematic philosophy of design while reading old cuttings that charted milestone moments in Polo’s nearly 60-year history. After that, you proceeded into a room of brand-curated historical “rigs” – the in-house term for an arrangement of garments and props used to define the look and feel of a specific Lauren-designed scene – that charted the pillar genres of his practice.

Also on display here were some gorgeous (and for-sale) artisanal Japanese customisations of vintage Polo pieces. Yui Narita of Osaka’s Brown Tabby Works layered an Aran-knit sweater with patches of vintage denim and workwear. Mitsugu Sasaki of Sasaki Yōhinten in Miyagi Prefecture applied indigo patches, drawing on the Japanese tradition of boro, to a faded navy windbreaker, complete with a newly embroidered red Polo Pony. The Sashiko Gals, a collective of female artisans formed in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, recreated the Polo Bear using patches of indigo denim and chambray.

It was these artisans’s reverently fastidious yet romantically freewheeling approach to the Polo originals that came closest to capturing the extraordinary alchemy of the weekend-long affair. Lauren’s output spans a coast-to-coast survey of American dress – Ivy League, cowboy, rancher, Gatsby, outdoorsman, maritime, military, athletic and more – with a few traditions, such as English aristocratic style, imported from overseas. Each garment comes preloaded with meaning, steeped in a sense of history. Inside the vast exhibition space, this sartorial melting pot was brought to life by attendees, mostly from Japan but also from across the world, who had taken these ingredients and combined them in ways entirely their own.

It was not unlike the famous Star Wars cantina scene: a gathering of different inhabitants and cultures from across the far-flung corners of a universe, all of them set on enjoyment. The Japanese attendees included fathers and sons, couples and entire families, often in highly individual combinations of pieces drawn from different decades and different corners of the Lauren landscape of Americana. American visitors included fly-ins from Atlanta and Brooklyn; French, Italian, and Aussie-English accents could be heard in the queue at Ralph’s Coffee and the PoloFest merch store.

In the main vintage selling space dealers mingled with their customers, collectors with more casual enthusiasts, and influencers and editors with brand executives. It was all very un-hierarchical and horizontal. David Lauren spent much of the first two days wandering through the marketplace, chatting with visitors, hanging out in the courtyard and happily posing for photographs. As we talked on the opening night, I noticed that a patch of herringbone on the right lapel of his herringbone jacket had become snagged and faded into a kind of woven static. “This is a jacket that my father gave me maybe 40 years ago,” he explained, adding, “in fashion, it’s rare for clothes to stay with you your whole life, but what my father wanted to do was to create clothes that would be handed down. Things that are a part of your life and tell stories about who you are.”

It seemed very unusual to see a brand embrace not only the conception and sale but also the life and resale of its products so wholeheartedly. “The people who are here are swapping those stories as much as they’re swapping the clothes,” Lauren added. One of the sellers was Richard Colligan, who has been trading vintage clothing since 1984 and opened his Manhattan store Metropolis in 1990. He likened entering PoloFest to Charlie entering Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. “It’s just eye candy from one end to the other,” he said, during one of the series of talks that were programmed during the event. He thanked the brand for giving himself and the broader vintage community “this unbelievable respect I never thought I could ever receive in my life.”

One especially riveting speaker in that program was André 3000, who Sunday morning told Esquire’s Michael Sebastian his individual version of the broader Polo story: the evolution that occurs when Lauren’s carefully constructed American archetypes are adopted by wearers whose own experiences are removed from those imagined in the clothes.

Growing up in Atlanta, André recalled being introduced to Polo by his older cousin Travis, whose cast-off shirts became his own. He recounted the local movement called “hard prepping”, whose adherents wore tartan pants and riding boots instead of sneakers to school. “It was kind of like this 1950s motorcycle gang, but it was like prep,” he said. His own approach was different. “The cool thing was how do I add my story onto what Ralph is doing?” Clothes, he said, were elements to be combined in fresh ways. “You become almost like a painter.”

André also observed that Ralph Lauren himself started out as an outsider in the milieus he imagined. “Ralph Lauren is from the Bronx. He wasn’t necessarily from the world that he ended up creating.” This director’s-eye distance, he added, created that opportunity for reinterpretation. “If you grew up in it, you just look at these clothes like these clothes we just wear. But if you’re not from it, you love it so much that you want to make it the best.”

Jason Jules, author of Black Ivy, supplied a complementary perspective in conversation with Nordstrom’s Jian DeLeon. “Without external influences, prep wouldn’t exist,” he said, proposing that prep’s continued significance depends on outsiders taking ownership of a once-exclusive uniform to make it signify something new. Beyond prep, Jules theorised as to how Lauren can so effectively blur and co-mingle so many different archetypes. “It’s not just nostalgia; there’s a romantic element to it.” Lauren, Jules added, “gives you permission to wear clothes in a quite, quite wrong way.” And through doing so, he concluded, “you’re defining what’s right yourself.”

This theory of Polo’s capacity for right-wrongness, which enables it to be near-infinitely remixed while remaining fundamentally identifiable, also partly pointed to what was happening here at PoloFest. Different clusters and far-flung communities of Polo-stans, each with their own approach to and take on Polo’s expansive landscape of clothing, came together under one roof. That distillation created a kind of euphoria – several of the dealers and collectors described it as a life-highlight event – that can only serve to further stoke this community’s passion for Polo.

Discussing Lauren’s habit of revisiting his own archive in each new seasonal collection, Jules made this interesting observation: “It’s not like he’s updating it to make it relevant. It’s kind of bringing it back just to remind us that it always was relevant, always will be.”

Relevance is the difference between timelessness and anachronism, and maintaining it demands the oxygen of engagement and the evolution of interpretation. So just as the new Japanese labels on the existing vintage garments on sale here added a new chapter to the histories of the pieces, this event itself felt destined to become part of the provenance of the community that gathered here. And this reflected a dimension of design that David Lauren suggested had only begun to be fully realised for him and his father after they met that collector here back in 2006. “What happens with the clothes we make is that people make them part of their own lives. And then we get the satisfaction of hearing those stories – and that inspires the next collection.”