Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 2003 | Page 82

78 Popular Culture Review Pamela Fiori sums up this all encompassing universe: Long before I ever met him, Ralph Lauren was a part of my life. For years, I had slept on his sheets, dried myself with his towels, worn his clothes, applied his mascara and given Polo shirts, ties and fragrances as gifts (always gratefully received) to the male members of my family. And although I have yet to paint a room in one of his hues or cuddle up with a lion cub, as model Bridget Hall does in his Safari ads, I hope one day I will. (140) Thus by surrounding one’s self with everything “RL,” one can enter the world of the ads! This is a world that has stood still, one that is not affected by the vagar ies of industrial civilization. In these ads, as in the Ralph Lauren universe, there is no reference to contemporary society. These worlds are both historical recreations and ahistorical reconfigurations. The ads, like the stores and the boutiques, are devoid of anything that is technological or even modem. There are no clock radios, computers, stereos. As Rybczynski has astutely recognized, “There are pipe racks and humidors in the bedrooms, but no cordless telephones, no televisions.... The mechanical paraphernalia of contemporary living has been put away, and replaced by brass-cornered gun boxes, silver bedside water carafes, and leather-bound books” (11). Perhaps this is suggestive of the idea that the people who inhabit this world have servants to do the mundane tasks. The fantasy is of “old world splendor” or the “English country house” where living well is an art and a career. Here, there are no distractions. The absence of technology reflects the focus on the past. This is a nostalgic fantasy of a world when there were no intrusions, and in particular, reinforces the “veneration of the archaic” as an ideal. Clothing has the unique ability to serve, in the words of Fred Davis, as a “visual metaphor for identity.” Thus the significance of dress and appearance as Goffman and others have recognized should not be discounted as trivial. Like pos sessions, clothing not only allows us to manage our ambivalences, but at the same time, for many people, serves to codify and classify what we want people to think of us (Davis 25). Relevant here is the fact that since people began to wear clothes, the more expensive and elaborate the dress, then generally, the higher one’s status. The expense of clothing was just as key to decoding who one was, as much as the “look”. It was important for one “not to dress above one’s station” and “sumptuary laws” periodically governed what one could wear. (Lurie 115-116) What is essen tial here is the fact that, historically, vast gulfs separated the classes yet at the same time one could simply tell by looking at the garment and the wearer, whether or not it was dear. But as Lurie has remarked, beginning in the twentieth century, “counterfeit” (re)productions, synthetics, and modem manufacturing techniques