Beyond Polo’s Oak Bluffs

Acquisitions No. 4: Sign Values, Outsider Status, and the Whitest State in the Nation

In “The Uncomfortable Truth of Ralph Lauren’s Oak Bluffs” I discussed the Black bourgeoisie’s social and economic proximity to whiteness to explain the underlying complexities of a recent Polo Ralph Lauren collection. In honoring Black life in Oak Bluffs, a town on Martha’s Vineyard, Polo helps maintain what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier referred to as a “make-believe ‘society’” Black Americans created to escape their subordinate status. Born from the house servants who acquired “a type of discipline which caused them to identify themselves with their masters,” the Black bourgeoisie prioritized the accumulation and presentation of wealth to maintain said society. What I did not say is that this proximity and discipline explains why the Polo Ralph Lauren for Oak Bluffs collection looks so… white.

A white presenting model in Polo’s Spelman College Linen Blazer