President Trump is not the only one with the last Gilded Age on his mind. On Thursday, Ralph Lauren 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 the New York Life Insurance Company, complete with marble Corinthian columns, a 29-foot coffered ceiling, an ornate staircase and its own vault.
The setting was a departure from Mr. 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.
The actor Anne Hathaway was there, in a beige trench coat and bedazzled beige denim. So were the singer Kacey Musgraves, in a white tank top and cowboy hat; the actor Ariana DeBose, in pinstripes; and “The White Lotus” ingénue Sarah Catherine Hook, in a necktie. What was not there, however: corsets. Or bustles. (That was good news.)
Instead, Mr. 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, and sometimes truncated into knickerbockers so they only looked like they were tucked into the boots.
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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Lauren’s cinematic productions, and more pointed.
It seemed to say, forget the hemline index — that folky “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, Mr. Lauren materialized on the grand hall’s mezzanine, wearing a black longhorn sweater. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who was sitting next to Mr. Lauren’s wife, Ricky, craned her neck upward and snapped photos on her smartphone as her fellow guests applauded and Mr. Lauren waved to the audience spread out below. Lord, for the moment, of all he surveyed.
