This Is Ralph Lauren’s Most Ralph Lauren Line
2025 was Ralph Lauren’s year. That might not sound like much of a triumph: for the last five decades or so, every year has sort of been Ralph Lauren’s year. But 2025 was especially good to the maestro of American menswear, whose iconic pony logo has never been hotter, and whose genre-colliding vision of preppy style has never resonated harder.
Amid all the crowing press blasts, though, it was easy to miss a slightly wonkier tidbit of Ralph Lauren lore: Doug Bihlmaier, the brand’s in-house vintage guru, was hanging up his threadbare chore coat for good—and auctioning off a treasure trove of grails from his own closet to celebrate.
Bihlmaier’s retirement thrust the beloved archivist into the spotlight for more reasons than one. Unless you’re a regular on the estate sale circuit (or the forums that venerate Bihlmaier’s darned-to-death style) you probably weren’t aware of the role he played at RRL, Ralph Lauren’s deeply influential line of frontier Americana. Missed out on scoring a rare gem from Bihlmaier’s own closet? Don’t sweat it—you didn’t miss out on any of the RRL wares those gems eventually inspired.
In 2026, RRL doesn’t riff—it resurrects, pulling from the best decades of the great American style canon at each step of the way. Sun-faded fatigue pants from the ‘40s? Paint-splattered flannels from the ‘20s? Belted cardigans from the ‘60s? All fair game, and all reproduced to a T.
As a result, the sub-label doesn’t always look like the rest of Ralph Lauren’s world, and its stores, where RRL product shares space with the source material that inspired it, are universes unto themselves. (RRL’s line sheets—the lists of products theoretically available to third-party retailers each season—are among the most intricate in the business; picture a Cheesecake Factory menu with detailed information on the provenance of each dish.)
So if this is the first you’re hearing of RRL, the rugged frontiersman of the Ralph Lauren family, here’s a handy rundown of the products it does best.
