Ralph Lauren Menswear SS27 Review: Italian Glamour, Sashiko Craft and Prep Reimagined

Ralph Lauren SS27 Menswear Review: Italian Glamour, Sashiko Craft and Prep Reimagined

Ralph Lauren Menswear SS27 opened with a statement of intent: Purple Label, the house’s pinnacle tailoring line, delivered a run of looks that felt simultaneously cinematic and completely wearable. The reference point was the golden age of Italian motor racing, specifically the sun-soaked glamour of Lake Como and the circuits that once drew elegant crowds in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a world defined by speed and beauty in equal measure, and Ralph Lauren translated that duality into clothes with uncommon precision.

The opening sequence introduced silk-blend suits in a palette of sandy neutrals and deep indigos. These are not colours that announce themselves; they earn attention slowly, the way a well-chosen car colour looks better the longer you study it in changing light. Worn with band-collar shirts and easy utility jackets, the suits struck a balance between formality and ease that is genuinely difficult to achieve. The band collar in particular felt modern without being aggressive, stripping away the necktie obligation and allowing the suiting to breathe.

The Italian racing influence became more explicit as the segment progressed. Buttery leather jackets appeared in cognac and deep brown tones, worn over textured knits and featherlight ties that moved with the kind of relaxed confidence that money alone cannot manufacture. Pinstriped tailoring arrived in cuts that were neither boxy nor slim, occupying that considered middle ground where clothes stop competing with the body and simply complement it.

Two pieces deserve particular attention:

• The cream silk-and-linen evening jacket: This was the collection’s single most elegant item. Cut with a relaxed chest and minimal structure, it offered the kind of warmth-weather formality that belongs on a terrace overlooking still water at dusk. The fabric combination, silk for drape and linen for texture, gave it depth without weight.
• The relaxed tuxedos: Worn with an ease that brought genuine louche energy to black-tie dressing, these tuxedos suggested that formality is most compelling when it is not trying too hard. The silhouettes were soft rather than constructed, with lapels and trousers that favoured movement over precision.

What makes the Italian racing reference work as a creative anchor is that it does not demand period accuracy. Ralph Lauren was not costuming a film. He was distilling a feeling, specifically the feeling of someone who belongs in beautiful places and dresses without apparent effort. That earned quality, the sense of clothes worn by someone with a life rich enough to have softened them, is exactly what Purple Label at its best delivers. The SS27 collection reminded you why that ambition, pursued with genuine craft, still resonates in an era of fast mode and disposable trend cycles.

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The Craft Details That Elevated the Collection

Great tailoring is rarely elevated by its silhouette alone. The details that surround and finish a collection are what separate clothes from a genuine point of view, and the SS27 accessories and embellishments demonstrated exactly that principle. Ralph Lauren’s team looked outward for inspiration, drawing on sources that might seem far removed from Italian lakeside glamour but which, in context, gave the collection genuine cultural texture.

The jewelry and sunglasses range drew on two distinct visual languages: vintage rodeo buckles and Art Deco prints. On paper, those references sit miles apart. In practice, the combination produced accessories with a bold graphic confidence that complemented rather than competed with the tailoring. The rodeo buckle motif, abstracted and refined, appeared in belt hardware and small jewelry pieces that carried a hint of American West swagger recontextualized within European tailoring. The Art Deco influence provided geometric counterpoint, all clean angles and deliberate symmetry, in sunglasses frames and cufflinks that rewarded close inspection.

The most significant craft story in the collection, however, was the collaboration with Japanese label Kuon. Founded in Tokyo and known for its rigorous approach to traditional Japanese textile techniques, Kuon brought hand-worked sashiko embroidery to Purple Label tailoring. Sashiko is a centuries-old Japanese stitching tradition, originally developed to reinforce and repair indigo-dyed fabric, characterized by running stitches in geometric patterns that are as structurally functional as they are visually striking.

Applied to pristine Purple Label tailoring, the effect was arresting for the following reasons:

1. Visual character: The white stitching against dark tailoring fabric created contrast that drew the eye without disrupting the clean lines of the garments. It suggested labor and intention, which is precisely what separates a handmade detail from a printed approximation.
2. Cultural credibility: Collaborating with Kuon rather than simply borrowing an aesthetic gave the embroidery genuine provenance. Kuon’s artisans practice sashiko with expertise accumulated across generations, and that knowledge is visible in the consistency and quality of the stitchwork.
3. Cross-cultural dialogue: The pairing of American tailoring ambition, filtered through an Italian lens, with Japanese hand-craft created a conversation across traditions that felt genuinely global rather than superficially eclectic.

For a global audience that increasingly values transparency about craft and origin, this collaboration offered something beyond visual novelty. It demonstrated that the house is willing to enter real creative partnerships rather than simply licensing an aesthetic. The sashiko detail elevated individual pieces from accomplished tailoring to something closer to wearable craft objects. In a collection filled with beautiful clothes, it was the detail that made you look twice.

Polo Ralph Lauren: Prep Deconstructed and Rebuilt with Personality

If Purple Label made the case for tailoring as a form of quiet authority, the Polo Ralph Lauren segment made an entirely different argument: that the American prep wardrobe is most interesting when someone is brave enough to pull it apart and reassemble it without following the original instructions. Ralph Lauren has arguably spent his career in productive tension with the preppy codes he helped codify, and SS27 found that tension at its most productive and playful.

The segment opened with madras checks in bold, multi-colored plaids, associated with the fabric’s Indian origins and its adoption in American collegiate dressing. Rather than presenting them as nostalgic references, the collection used madras as raw material, cutting it into patchwork constructions that combined multiple colorways within a single garment. The result was not chaotic but purposefully collaged, as though the clothes had accumulated their character over time rather than arriving fully formed from a factory.

Cricket jackets and varsity staples followed, each treated with the same appetite for intervention. Embroidery appeared on jackets and knitwear, referencing team insignia and club traditions, but was applied in combinations that no actual institution would have sanctioned. This is the distinction that matters: Ralph Lauren was not recreating prep, he was treating it as a vocabulary and then constructing new sentences with familiar words.

Standout combinations from the Polo segment included:

• Three-piece suits with ruffled shirts: Styled with Edwardian neckwear, these looked nothing like a country-house portrait and everything like a confident, eccentric campus figure with strong opinions about fabric. The ruffled shirt removed any stuffy formality and replaced it with theatrical personality.
• Patchwork cricket jackets: Multi-fabric constructions that combined striped, checked, and solid panels in ways that felt collegiate but distinctly current.
• The closing hand-embroidered patchwork varsity jacket: This final look served as the collection’s thesis statement. Every technique explored across the segment- patchwork construction, hand embroidery, and varsity codes- was present in a single garment that felt genuinely special rather than merely summarising.

What this segment signals for American prep in menswear is worth considering carefully. Prep has spent several seasons in a state of revival, surfacing in various forms across brands ranging from heritage institutions to downtown labels. Ralph Lauren’s approach in SS27 suggests a more durable direction: rather than reviving prep as period costume or ironic citation, the collection treated its codes as living material, capable of growth and recombination. The energy was not nostalgic; it was inventive. Heritage functioned as a starting point rather than a destination, and the clothes were better for it.

Ralph Lauren SS27 menswear demonstrated, across both Purple Label and Polo, that a designer who has spent decades defining a specific vision of American style can still find genuine freshness within that vision. The collection did not chase external trends or reach for conceptual justification. It delivered beautifully made, expertly styled clothes with genuine range, from a cream silk evening jacket destined for Como to a hand-embroidered varsity jacket that belongs at every latitude. That combination of confidence and craft, unhurried and unforced, is as relevant a message as menswear can send.