Second life of the pony: vintage Polo Ralph Lauren collecting meets boro and sashiko

PoloFest set a resale marketplace beside an archive show and repair workshops where Sasaki Yōhinten and Brown Tabby Works patched and remade Polo pieces

PoloFest Tokyo: Ralph Lauren hosts the vintage Polo trade

From October 23 to 25, 2026, Ralph Lauren held the first PoloFest at Jing Harajuku, in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. The program ran on three tracks: an archival exhibition, a speaker series and a vintage marketplace. Seventeen dealers sold second-hand Polo garments under the company’s roof.

The company presents PoloFest as the first global activation ahead of its sixtieth anniversary in 2027. Tokyo opens a series of gatherings planned for other cities. The company has not named the next stops in its announcement.

Ralph Lauren and Polo: neckties in New York, 1967

Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx in 1939. He worked as a salesman, including a period at Brooks Brothers, before designing neckties. In 1967, he sold ties under the Polo name through the manufacturer Beau Brummell. The name referred to a sport tied to the English upper class and to American East Coast clubs.

The company grew from that line into menswear, then womenswear, fragrance and home products. Polo stayed as the name of its core label. The polo player logo stayed on the chest of its knit shirts. The vintage market at PoloFest dealt mostly in that label and its offshoots.

The polo shirt, 1972: cotton piqué, ribbed collar, embroidered pony

The polo shirt followed in 1972, five years after the neckties. It was a short-sleeved knit in lightweight cotton, with a ribbed collar and a two-button placket. An embroidered polo player sat on the chest. The company issued it in a range of colors from the first season.

In 2022, for the shirt’s fiftieth year, Rizzoli published Ralph Lauren’s Polo Shirt. The book covers the garment and the people who wear it. The company still produces the shirt, in new colors and fits. The vintage market deals in the earlier runs. Dealers date older pieces by their labels, their country of manufacture and their construction. Each shirt carries a label at the collar, and the company changed its label designs over five decades. Those details separate one shirt from the next on a marketplace table.

Collectors also track the lines the company built around the shirt in the nineties. Polo Sport and Polo Country recur on dealers’ inventories. So does the 1992 Stadium collection, which the company has since reissued in limited editions. A secondary trade has formed around these lines through shops, fairs and Instagram accounts. PoloFest brought that trade into a space the company designed.

Take Ivy, VAN Jacket and Ametora: how Tokyo learned to collect American clothing

Tokyo’s vintage trade rests on decades of study. Kensuke Ishizu founded VAN Jacket in 1951 and sold Ivy League clothing to Japanese students from the late fifties. In 1965, photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida shot Take Ivy on American campuses, a project tied to VAN. Writer W. David Marx traced this history in Ametora, published in 2015. Mr. Marx moderated a session at PoloFest.

Japanese editors catalogued, ranked and recombined them. According to WWDJAPAN, Ralph Lauren appeared in MEN’S CLUB in the seventies. In the eighties, POPEYE promoted Polo without logos: cricket sweaters, button-down shirts and pleated chinos. In the 2020s, Japanese vintage shops began sourcing Polo from the eighties and nineties in the United States.

Lo Lifes: Brooklyn, 1988, and Polo worn head to toe

The vintage Polo market also has roots in New York. In 1988, two Brooklyn crews merged to form the Lo Lifes. Polo U.S.A. came from Brownsville; Ralphie’s Kids came from Crown Heights. Members dressed in Ralph Lauren from head to toe, and many shoplifted the clothes. The name comes from the last syllable of Polo. The crew’s motto, the 2LLs, stands for love and loyalty. In 2016, Jon Caramanica of The New York Times credited the group with helping tie hip-hop to designer clothing.

That same year, Lo Life founder Thirstin Howl the 3rd and photographer Tom Gould published Bury Me With the Lo On. The book records the crew’s history. At PoloFest, the two co-authors spoke on October 23 about the Lo Life movement. Model and actor Tyson Beckford, who appeared in Polo campaigns in the nineties, was also on the speaker list. So was Jason Jules, author of Black Ivy. The book documents how Black Americans wore and adapted Ivy League clothing in the fifties and sixties.

The Lo Life subculture has since spread beyond New York, with followers in Europe, Australia, Brazil and Japan. Its members still trade and wear Polo pieces from the late eighties and early nineties.

The archive exhibition: Polo Sport, Polo Bears and tailoring

Next to the market, the company mounted an exhibition of archival Polo pieces. Reports from the opening describe Polo Sport jackets in display cases. Polo Bear knits, tailoring and accessories filled the rest of the space. Ralph’s Coffee, the company’s café concept, served the venue across the three days. The exhibition displayed archive pieces; the marketplace sold dealers’ stock. Visitors moved between the two in the same building. A program of craft sessions ran alongside the talks.

Boro and sashiko: patching, layering and running stitch on Polo garments

The three workshops drew on different methods of Japanese repair. Boro is the practice of patching and layering worn cloth, often indigo-dyed hemp or cotton. The Victoria and Albert Museum dates its examples to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rural households handed these garments down and patched them as they wore through. The museum links the practice to rural poverty and to mottainai, a Japanese term for regret over waste.

Sashiko is a running stitch. In boro, rows of sashiko hold patches in place and quilt layers of cloth together. Boro describes how a garment is built up over time; sashiko is one of the stitches used to build it, and is also used on its own.

Mitsugu Sasaki runs Sasaki Yōhinten from a former clinic in Miyagi Prefecture. The workshop repairs noragi, the cotton work clothes of farmers and tradespeople. For PoloFest, Mr. Sasaki patched a faded navy Polo windbreaker with vintage indigo cloth and embroidered a red pony on it. He also assembled new ties from pieces of old Polo neckwear.

Repair or reconstruction: what Brown Tabby Works did to Polo garments

Brown Tabby Works repairs and remakes old clothing. Besides the oilcloth jacket, Yui Narita mended, darned and reinforced a Polo Aran-knit sweater with vintage denim and workwear cloth. A toggle coat received darns and patches cut from Ralph Lauren shirts in plaid, gingham and candy stripe. A pair of chinos gained embroidered smiley faces.

The pieces show three operations. Repair restores function: a darn closes a hole in a knit. Reconstruction cuts cloth from donor garments and builds it into another, as with the oilcloth jacket. Embroidery adds a motif with no structural role.

Editorial Team