Buying In - (Page 17) buying in 17 success seems curious indeed. Here, after all, is an outsider suburbanite who created a logo that became synonymous with hip-hop culture and urban style. But symbolic meaning can be invented. After all, think about Ralph Lifshitz. He grew up in a Bronx apartment, far from the milieu of the patrician upper class. He saw the swells in the movies and during the summers that he worked as a waiter in the Catskills, in the 1950s. He wanted to be like them, so he dressed like them, even in high school. Eventually his father, a Russian immigrant, changed the family surname to Lauren. Ralph Lauren dropped out of city college, got a job as a seller of suits at Brooks Brothers, and toiled away in the nether regions of the rag trade until he designed a line of fancy neckties that was picked up by Bloomingdale’s in 1967. They were sold as emblems of status, under his new brand name, Polo. In her book The End of Fashion, journalist Teri Agins credits Lauren with going on to invent “lifestyle merchandising,” building what looked like exclusive little boutiques, replicated in countless department stores. A working-class Jewish kid from the Bronx defined WASP status in a way that was accessible on a mass scale. He made it the acceptable thing for the skeptical sixteen-year-old Jersey mall rat who would become Marc Ecko and who never gave a thought to whether the relationship between that Polo symbol and the man who created it was an “authentic” one or not. the “projectability” of hello kitty Logos, then, like any other kind of symbol, can have real meaning, and that meaning can be created. This is true even if the resulting symbol lacks “authenticity” in the sense of a direct,
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