The fabulous life of legendary fashion billionaire Ralph Lauren, who dressed Melania Trump for the inauguration
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Ralph Lauren has a long history of working with important American figures. The designer's most recent credits include dressing first lady Melania Trump for the 2017 inauguration.
Trump wore a powder blue Ralph Lauren suit, which many compared to the pale blue suit that Jackie Kennedy wore to her husband's inauguration in 1961. Ralph Lauren also designed the cream-colored suit that Hillary Clinton donned for the 2017 inauguration.
Ralph Lauren is a name synonymous with American fashion. His net worth is now estimated to be nearly $6 billion, according to Forbes. And yet, the story of how he built one of the largest fashion companies in the world from nothing isn't quite so well-known.
Here's how he amassed that wealth, and what he uses it for.
Ralph Lifshitz was born in New York City in 1939, the youngest of four by Russian Jewish immigrants. As a teenager, he changed his last name to Lauren and walked around his Bronx neighborhood wearing outlandish styles like army fatigues and tweed jackets.
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After dropping out of Baruch College two years in, he enlisted in the US Army and served from 1962 to 1964. He then had a short stint as a tie salesman at Brooks Brothers and another, now-defunct tie company.
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By 26, he was designing and selling his own neckwear. He put together "rags" and fashioned them into ties. He designed a fatter, European-style neck tie, making them "out of a drawer" in the Empire State Building.
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