But success came at a price.  Tenement sweatshops offered employees low wages, long hours, and horrific working conditions.  The catastrophic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911—the worst of many industrial accidents during that period—forced drastic changes in the 1920s and ’30s.  The result was a more modernized and professionalized industry, which migrated uptown to a new, purpose-built complex of fireproof workshops and showrooms on Seventh Avenue.  The largely Jewish labor force adapted with it: Hattie Carnegie (born Henrietta Kanengeiser), Adrian (Adrian Adolph Greenberg), Mollie Parnis (Sarah Rosen Parnis), and Norman Norell (Norman David Levinson) all made the leap from sweatshops into the rarefied world of high fashion. 

At the outbreak of World War II, most American women—and journalists—still looked to Paris for guidance.  Manufacturers were complicit in this exchange, paying French couture houses for the right to knock off their designs.  But with the Paris fashion industry paralyzed by the war, New York was freed from its dictates.  A new generation of designers seized the chance to define American style on their own terms. 

Americans had never put much stock in fashion pedigrees. “ In Europe, they fetishize the old names,” the fashion historian Valerie Steele says in the Mizrahi exhibition catalogue. “ In America we want the next new thing.”  Instead of looking abroad, American designers began to explore closer to home, finding inspiration in the athletic, informal, and practical category of clothing known as sportswear.  This typically American style quickly went global.  Even today, says Mizrahi, “if you look at all the best European designers, their clothes reflect this American ideal.” 

From the beginning, American style was synonymous with WASP culture.  Sportswear was the uniform of the prep school, the Ivy League, the yacht club, the golf course—institutions that had historically been closed to Jews.  Conservative in both its appearance and in its staunch resistance to change, WASP style was exclusive and democratic at the same time. “ To me, being a WASP has nothing to do with religion or money,” wrote the design author Susanna Salk in A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style.  Instead, it signifies “an ideal combination of intellect, grace, and joie de vivre.”  It wasn’t about what you wore but how you wore it; nevertheless, certain garments were easily identifiable as “preppy.” 

Ralph Lauren once addressed this cultural tension: “People ask how a Jewish kid from the Bronx does preppy clothes.  Does it have to do with class and money?  It has to do with dreams.”  Lauren, born Ralph Rueben Lifshitz, was a yeshiva boy, the son of Ashkenazi immigrants from Belarus whose mother dreamed that he would become a rabbi.  But young Lauren didn’t fit in at school, so he worked to stand out, copying the impeccably tailored look he saw in Hollywood movies, another dream factory where Jews played a prominent role.  Fashion was his defense mechanism against his poor immigrant upbringing, and his adopted moniker functioned in the same way.  Unlike his contemporary Arnold Isaacs, who reversed the letters of his last name to create the pseudo-Italianate label Scaasi, Lauren didn’t change his name solely to succeed in the fashion business.  He was still a teenager at the time, and simply tired of being teased. 

Lauren began his career behind the counter at Brooks Brothers, where he could study WASPs in their natural habitat.  Though he had no formal design training, he realized that the most effective way to sell clothes was to sell an entire lifestyle.  In 1967, he launched Polo, named for the ultimate Anglophile sport.  Lauren’s personal aspirations turned out to be the aspirations of many—not just second-generation immigrants striving to “think Yiddish, dress British,” but also go-getting Reagan-era Yuppies and nostalgic WASPs who’d seen their way of life crumble in the anti-establishment tumult of the late 1960s and early ’70s.  Suddenly, anyone could buy what had once been an elite birthright—it was no longer how you wore it, but what you wore.