Jill Biden Joins Ralph Lauren’s Luxury World in the Hamptons

By Rachel Tashjian / The Washington Post

14:45 JST, September 7, 2024

BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y. – It was 7:45 p.m. on Thursday night, and first lady Jill Biden was in her element: the corner booth of the toughest table in New York, Ralph Lauren’s wood-paneled Polo Bar. The man himself was on her left, with Lauren’s son and heir apparent David Lauren and his wife, Lauren Bush Lauren, granddaughter of George H.W. Bush, on her right. She was glowing in a black Ralph Lauren suit, a sparkly brooch climbing up her lapel.

This was a power player room, with Naomi Watts, Jude Law, Tom Hiddleston, Usher, Justin Theroux and Anna Wintour, who hosted a fundraiser for Kamala Harris with Tory Burch and Aurora James in the Hamptons over Labor Day weekend, also in attendance. Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Lucky Blue Smith – the husband of absurdist tradwife Nara Smith, famous for making everything from mozzarella cheese to bubble gum from scratch on TikTok – had modeled in Lauren’s Spring 2025 fashion show moments before. (Asked if there was anything she couldn’t make from scratch, Nara Smith, in a pinstripe Ralph suit with no shirt, answered, “Ozempic!”)

It had all the trappings of a great New York City night – only we were 100 miles away in Bridgehampton. Lauren’s team had spent the past several weeks painstakingly re-creating the midtown restaurant in a tent on a stable grounds, down to the hunter-green paint, salon-style horse portraits and celebrated maître d’ Nelly Moudime. Rumors trotted around the room that this was all done to the tune of $16 million. Why? With Lauren, the answer usually boils down to because I can. (The compound is for sale, to the tune of $15 million, if you’re in the market. Polo Bar not included.)

Maybe all great designers are like Jay Gatsby – sentimental dreamers, in pursuit of a rose-colored update of a semi-fictional past – but Lauren most of all. And asking hundreds of editors, celebrities and influencers to travel upward of eight hours door-to-door for one 20-minute show was the height of decadence. Several high-profile guests were flown in and out by helicopter.

Lauren’s name is synonymous with American fashion (Biden and her husband often wear his clothes), but his aesthetic can seem dated when preppiness has been corrupted by designers such as Eli Russell Linnetz and Miuccia Prada at Miu Miu, and made sensitive by newer brands such as Bode. Every designer is talking about style over fashion now – meaning that creative directors give people the tools to express themselves rather than hand out trends – but Lauren is the one who invented it. His boxy-shouldered women’s jackets and Katharine Hepburn-ish wide trousers looked very modern: a little arrogant but very easy to slip on.

Yet somehow the long-brimmed baseball caps, sequin caps and pleasingly slapdash mix of western, beach and country club were heavier on stylishness than style. The designer comes out at the end wearing straight-leg jeans, a USA windbreaker and sneakers and looks so cool; why can’t the runway more consistently channel his freaky freedom? Maybe, to bring it back to America, we live in a time when the individual can take risks, but businesses are so concerned with talking to the most consumers possible that they are afraid to lead.

The nearly three-hour trip back to the city at 10 p.m., when many people (including Biden) had to be in Midtown at 8 a.m. for a Vogue-hosted march to kick off Fashion Week, threw into stark relief the line between the have-nots and the have-helicopters.

The week had started before it even began. Friday is the first official day of New York Fashion Week, but on Wednesday, Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez staged a show in an airy Tribeca loft. Their collections since February 2023 have been a jolt to well-heeled American women who, in New York at least, have been wearing slightly oversize tailoring and slightly avant-garde cocktail dresses, and talking about style as an extension of their personalities, thanks to Proenza and the return, a year ago, of Phoebe Philo.

But this season, the brand’s striped knits and shirting, knot-front dresses and carwash fringes looked too much like the New Arrivals section of a luxury e-tailer – fun ideas from other people, rather than a treatise on how a polished, powerful woman wants to present herself now. Yet their gowns, such as a strapless column of tubes and a softly draped sexy Greek goddess dress, would make better award season fodder than whatever the big luxury houses are paying actors thousands to wear at the moment.

Later that morning, Clare Waight Keller, formerly of Chloe and Givenchy, showed the third iteration of her C line – fashioned-up basics, whose energy she now plans to roll into the main offerings at Uniqlo in her new role as creative director. That perch gives Waight Keller the opportunity to do for the masses what McCollough and Hernandez have done for the few: spiff up the everyday wardrobe of the everyday person. “Customers today want the perfect T-shirt, the perfect sweatshirt,” Keller said, and more and more people, whether they pay attention to Fashion Week or roll their eyes at it, are looking for that at the Uniqlo price point.

The rest of the day belonged to French wunderkind Simon Porte Jacquemus – known for making things that are either giant (like hats) or tiny (like bags) – who was honored by the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Couture Council. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, praised Jacquemus’s “fun, naive and sometimes surreal minimalism.”

The Jacquemus tribute is intriguing because the 34-year-old designer is reportedly in talks to lead Chanel, one of the many high-profile open jobs in Europe. Later that evening, at a Nordstrom cocktail party to honor him (again!), the designer, wearing sunglasses, talked about how much he loves America: “There is so much possibility here,” he said, though it was unclear whether he was referring to politics or accessories. He plans to do a stateside show “soon.” Jacquemus, who has shown in the middle of Provençal lavender fields and on Capri, certainly shares the late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld’s talent for world-building – and Jay Gatsby’s, for that matter – but like so many designers today, his clothes can seem beside the point. What he does have is a remarkable, even savant-like, understanding of social media. Is that enough to carry a house that once modernized femininity into the 21st century?

The question that should be on everyone’s mind this week, as the second female presidential candidate in history continues to make her case to the country, is: What clothing can help a woman feel commanding and self-possessed? (Especially given the fashion industry has essentially thrown its weight behind Kamala Harris.) Surely there is more to the next iteration of power dressing than whatever can be encapsulated in a viral video.