Fashion Blogs

Photo: vintage wedding dresses

Around the corner are faint echoes of Hemingway’s drinking buddy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in flowered garden-party frocks and tweed tailcoats: a reminder that Mr. Lauren also got credit, though the costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge was as bitter as a sloe gin fizz about it, for the looks in the film version of “The Great Gatsby” 40 years ago.

“I love your necklace,” said another salesclerk and, regarding a dark gray poncho, “We have that in other colors.”

You don’t see the full rainbow effect, though, till reaching the third floor, on bulkhead-lamp-lit wooden stairs or an elevator whose slight creak may well have been rigged to enhance the ambience. There, a large nook is stuffed with the signature shirt, shrunken for the female form, and knit crew necks. “You need to get your head in all that cashmere and float around,” a senior Ralphette called collegially to the minder of these items.

In a dressing room lined in relief wallpaper, I tried an oversize camel pullover with elbow patches over black leather leggings ($995), which have gone from being punk to a mass-market standard; they were perfectly nice, and if I were packing off my Pretty Baby to Princeton, I’d consider putting ’em in her trunk.

“Another long exhausting day,” Ms. Stritch sang. “Another thousand dollars.”

Ralph Lauren built his business on an ideal of the American upper class captured in an eternal golden afternoon of leisure pursuits; this is his moment of reckoning with the Rich Kids of Instagram. Compared with their absentee parents, he‘s a benevolent paterfamilias, with his beatific wife, Ricky, formulating blueberry muffins, in the mold of the late department store Jordan Marsh, for Ralph’s, where the Colombe is good and strong ($3, no refills). In November, the company will open a restaurant around the corner, in a space formerly occupied by La Côte Basque.