How Ricky Lauren Turned Hamptons Ease Into an American Style Code

As the family story goes, Ricky Ann Loew-Beer was reciting Chaucer from the passenger seat of a green Morgan on their first date when Ralph Lauren decided she was beguiling, beautiful and worth chasing. In 1964, she was an English student at Hunter College, earning extra money behind the desk of an ophthalmologist’s office. He was the young necktie salesman who arrived for an appointment and left with her phone number. Their first date involved a drive upstate, a pancake house and, according to legend, a proposal before the plates had been cleared. They married that December.

Ricky never confined herself to the ceremonial occupation of designer’s wife. The New York-born daughter of Austrian immigrants taught fifth grade in the Bronx, studied photography and trained as a psychotherapist while raising Andrew, David and Dylan Lauren. She also became an author, publishing Safari, based on photographs from a 1983 journey through Africa, followed by My Island, Cuisine, Lifestyle and Legend of the Double RL Ranch and The Hamptons: Food, Family, and History. Few muses have arrived with quite so much extracurricular competence.

Naturally, fashion made her recognizable without ever becoming her job. Ralph has written that the woman he wanted to dress was neither lacquered nor precious, but “the girl in jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, wearing her boyfriend’s jacket.” Ricky supplied the prototype in real life. A 1990 Los Angeles Times profile christened her “The Polo Persona,” a useful name for the lean tailoring, washed denim, riding boots, white shirting and Western silver that became the house’s native tongue. Years later, Ralph Lauren gave her name to the Ricky bag, its stately hardware and saddle-leather construction turning private inspiration into a rather expensive public object.

The East End furnished that fantasy. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Laurens passed through a rented Southampton barn, Amagansett, East Hampton and finally Montauk, where the clothes acquired salt, dog hair and the occasional honest crease. That lived-in quality matters. Ralph Lauren sold America a beautifully appointed fiction, but Ricky made it look plausible. Across more than half a century of photographs, hemlines rise, shoulders broaden and eveningwear grows theatrical. Her method barely budges: one strong jacket, an open collar, something borrowed from a man and nothing worn as though it had taken all afternoon.