Ralph Lauren brings back big pants at latest fashion show (2025)

NEW YORK – United States President Donald Trump is not the only one with the last Gilded Age on his mind.

On April 17, American fashion designer Ralph Lauren, 85, held his fall 2025 fashion show in the bank hall of the Clock Tower Building in lower Manhattan, an Italian Renaissance revival edifice that opened in 1898 as the home of New York Life Insurance, complete with marble Corinthian columns, an ornate staircase and its own vault.

The setting was a departure from Lauren’s recent trend of recreating his own environments as the backdrops of his collections. He has brought guests out to Ralph Hampton, his fantasy of Long Island; opened up his Madison Avenue headquarters; and recreated his Colorado ranch at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

But given the tenor of the time, his latest show venue felt pretty apropos.

Actress Anne Hathaway was there in a beige trenchcoat and bedazzled beige denim. So were singer Kacey Musgraves in a white tank top and cowboy hat; singer-actress Ariana DeBose in pinstripes; and The White Lotus (2021 to present) ingenue Sarah Catherine Hook, who broke out with the latest season of the series in a necktie.

What was not there, however: Corsets. Or bustles.

Instead, Lauren offered a parade of pants – and not just any old pants, but big pants. Pants that were almost always pleated and that billowed around the legs. Pants in leather and wool. Pants that were almost pantaloons, which sometimes were tucked into knee-high boots so they puffed out around the thighs.

With the pants, he showed a lot of lacy jabots and ruffled white shirts, frothing at the neck. Also beat-up leathers and the occasional slinky backless halter dress, almost always complete with its own jabot. Everything was in black and white or camel and brown, with the occasional flash of amethyst glittering in the light.

Lauren called the show The Modern Romantics. But its references seemed to be his own work from around the last turn of the century – especially the go-go Wall Street era when he built his empire – with, perhaps, a nod to the “dandy” theme of the upcoming Met Gala, that celebration of fashion and financial excess, mixed in.

And all of it was made more interesting by the tensions – between masculine and feminine, hard and soft – running like threads through the looks. The effect was less escapist than is often the case with Lauren’s cinematic productions and more pointed.

It seemed to say, forget the hemline index – that folksy “economic indicator” suggesting that skirts go up when things are good and come down when things turn bad – and instead consider the big pants gauge: the idea that when things get unpredictable, when you feel like you are teetering on the edge of the volcano, a lot of material around the legs may be exactly what everyone wants to wear. Well, it is a form of protective covering. Why not also a bellwether?

At the end of the show, Lauren materialised on the grand hall’s mezzanine, wearing a black longhorn sweater.

Veep (2012 to 2019) star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who was sitting next to Lauren’s wife, Ricky, craned her neck upwards and snapped photos on her smartphone as her fellow guests applauded and Lauren waved to the audience spread out below – lord, for the moment, of all he surveyed. NYTIMES