Ralph Lauren Purple Label SS27: The Rugged and the Refined

Ralph Lauren did not put a car in the courtyard this time. He put a mahogany speedboat.

It was the right call. The boat — a nod to a book the design team had found documenting a group of stylish Italian industrialists racing their Revos on Lake Como in the 1920s — set the tone for everything that followed at his Milan headquarters on Friday evening. Spring 2027 for both Purple Label and Polo Ralph Lauren was about the outdoors, but a very specific kind of outdoors: one with good tailoring, a lot of neckwear, and the quiet confidence of someone who has never once had to think about what to wear on a boat.

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Purple Label felt looser this season — in the best way. Slimmer tailoring silhouettes appeared alongside high-waisted silk-and-linen trousers with a flash of Old Hollywood in them, and the outerwear had that particular quality Lauren does better than almost anyone: utilitarian in construction, immaculate in execution. A yellow field jacket with hardware closures. A navy duffel with proper toggle fastenings. Pieces that look like they have been somewhere and are ready to go again.

The neckwear deserves its own paragraph. On a sweltering evening in Milan, Lauren sent out floppy scarf-like ties, velvet bows with a Western edge, and demonstrative cravats in shirting fabrics. It should not have worked. It absolutely worked. The silk necktie fabrics also migrated onto patchworked clothes, bags and dress pumps — a detail that rewards a second look.

A limited-edition capsule with Japanese design house Kuon brought the boro tradition — the Japanese art of mending and patching — into the Lauren universe via a shawl-collar dinner jacket. It is the kind of collaboration that makes complete sense in retrospect: two design philosophies that both treat clothing as something to be kept, repaired, and worn again rather than discarded.

Over at Polo, the energy was zingy and collegiate — madras windbreakers in searing shades, Nantucket red chinos, patchworked rugby shirts with banner graphics, and one standout ensemble of an orange puffer and camouflage trousers based on something Lauren himself wore in Montauk decades ago. The patchwork intarsia knit — a landscape of houses, cacti, cowboys and colour-blocked stripes — was the kind of piece that stops a room.

The show itself had the atmosphere of a very good party. Tom Hiddleston, Colman Domingo, Maluma and Henry Golding were in the courtyard. Lewis Hamilton arrived outside to a small crowd cheer — fresh from his historic first Ferrari victory at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix — wearing a tan linen shirt and trousers. A perfect outfit for a man who had just won a Grand Prix and was now, apparently, ready to take a speedboat out on Lake Como.

What Lauren keeps proving, season after season, is that aspiration does not have to mean distance. His clothes feel like they belong to a life being lived — actively, stylishly, with a lot of good luggage and at least one boat. Spring 2027 is his most convincing argument for that in years.