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Thursday, 15 November 2007 14:42 |
The Case of the Perfidious Pinstripes
A Ralph Lauren Mystery
 New York, New York: We were walking about Soho when we were stopped in our tracks by a slew of grinning Ralph Laurens. Normally, oversized bills - those wall-pasted advertisements with dimensions about two foot by three - don't draw our attention in a town lousy with them, but old Ralph had made the cover of Fortune and we couldn't help but to take careful note of the double-breasted pinstripe he sport. It seemed a fairly good fit but we noticed that the pinstripes at the lapels weren't properly aligned. Now, to many this is not an egregious tailoring flaw but it must be said that when the pinstripes are aligned, the entire suit pulls together to issue a bold statement. In possession of such a suit ourselves (which was probably a small fraction of the cost of Ralph's), we did think that being Ralph had to be wearing the most expensive suit of his line perhaps he ought to have considered the detail, and especially if the suit was to be seen on posters all about the city.
For the next few weeks we continued to pass Ralph and his misaligned suit, pointing out the small flaw to our sartorial-minded colleagues, and every time we pointed out we shook our heads, for it was starting to get on our nerves. Really. How could Ralph have overlooked that detail? It was so obvious. Believing the matter warranted a mention on these pages, we began an online search for the Fortune cover with preparations being made to compare Ralph's suit to ours, but imagine our astonishment when we finally found the cover in question, because instead of the mismatched lapels we had seen on the posters, the pinstripes were now perfectly aligned! Had our eyes been playing tricks? For two weeks we had passed those posters and could have sworn the lapel pinstripes had failed to match, but now upon seeing the Fortune cover, we weren't so sure. So back to Soho we went, this time with camera in hand, determined to find evidence of either our failing eyesight or RL's digital retailoring. We didn't think it was going to be a difficult task - after all, there are still ancient advertisements for 'Color TV Repair' to be found around the city - but it did prove to be just that and after a half day's walk we had to concede that all the posters had either been pulled down or plastered over.
A call to Fortune was our next order of business and after a round of telephonic transfers we were told the posters weren't available to the public and that put paid to that. The subway was then taken uptown to the Ralph Lauren flagship store on Seventy-second and Madison and an inspsection of his Purple Label line was made. The double-breasted model Ralph wore wasn't on the racks but there were a fair number of other pinstripes and we noted not one them had the aligned lapels. An inquiry to sales clerk was met with shrug. 'It probably custom-made for Mr. Lauren,' was his answer.
All along, we had been avoiding the inevitable: a call to RL's corporate office. To get a timely answer out of an empire that size is a near impossibility - meetings have to be scheduled, consultants need to be flown in from Botswana, and the guy who runs the elevator has to be briefed and debriefed - and after another round of transfers we came to a dead end with a voice maibox. We left a message and awaited a reply we never received. Finally, we consulted an expert.
Inspecting an enlargement of the Fortune cover, we discovered some faint traces of white between the pinstripes. Bernard Delgado, who is a Cad contributor, has been a newspaper staff artist for some two decades and believes there has been some digital tailoring of the photograph. 'The stripes look uneven or warped,' he says, and with a little digging he found a photograph of Ralph Lauren in another misaligned suit Without access to the original Fortune advertisements, however, it appears the mystery of the misaligned lapels will never be officially solved. Perhaps our eyes were playing trick on us. Perhaps it was all an optical illusion. Perhaps our expert could be wrong, or is it possible that someone at RL - someone with a detailed eye like ours - saw the posters and called Fortune for a retouch.
EXHIBIT A
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For this suit, it seems RL's tailors
could only match two stripes on
the right. Not one of the stripes on
his left is aligned. |
EXHIBIT B
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| Detail of Mr. Lauren's lapel. Top two stripes seem to curve up a bit and there are traces of white between the stripes. |
Detail of a less costly suit. |
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