American English

Ralph’s Coffee & Bar is in the Polo Ralph Lauren flagship store on Regent Street. It is rare that fashion admits food exists and when it does, it usually does something insane with it, like when the Berkeley Hotel celebrated fashion week by inventing a shoe biscuit, so you could eat your shoe.

But Ralph Lauren, who dresses Melania Trump because other designers will not — believing that the withholding of couture equals meaningful opposition to tyranny, a position that makes me laugh even as I place my head in the oven — goes beyond couture and into the weird lands of lifestyle. Don’t know who you are, but want to pretend that you do? Find a lifestyle brand that approximates who you think you might be, and follow it into a Polo Ralph Lauren coffin.

Polo Ralph Lauren will clad the itinerant international shopper — we are in Regent Street, where brands are countries, with flags — in a purely American fantasy of how aristocratic English people live. Spectator readers know that real English aristocrats shop at Tesco, think Peter Jones is overpriced and do not brush their hair for fear of dislodging small animals that may live there. They couldn’t afford to shop at Polo Ralph Lauren even if they wanted to; they would not know a silk tartan cushion if it addressed them by name. The interiors of Balmoral Castle, presumably the inspiration for Lauren’s glossy tartans, resemble the innards of a themed hotel that is closed for renovation. Balmoral furniture is a startling orange wood; paint pots are lined against windows in the service block; there is an ornamental stag in the garden.

Even so, how the ideal Polo Ralph Lauren person eats, according to Ralph Lauren, is worth knowing.